


The Company of Strangers

by Beatrice_Sank



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: (but it's minimal and mostly there for the Trauma), (which was incidentally my working title but Diane is no Mary Poppins), Canon Compliant, Diane Returns, Dreams and Nightmares, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I put all of my feels into this be warned, Is it about Laura Palmer?, Multi, Points of View, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Loop, Trauma, Tulpas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26265700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/pseuds/Beatrice_Sank
Summary: A week after she and Cooper disappeared, Diane reappears inside Twin Peaks Sheriff's Station.This is a recovery tale about two friends who are out of sync: Diane is slowly collecting the pieces of herself, while Albert is quietly losing himself to the void. But maybe they can meet in the middle."And the next Monday, she is back.It’s almost funny, in a sense. That absurd impulse to cry “honey, I’m home”, even when she has no idea where she is, only a vague inkling of who she is, and an iron-bound yet unaccounted for certitude that she’s never once in her life called anyone “honey”.It’s almost funny, because they aren’t expecting her, all those blurry faces standing in a police station that hasn’t seen any embellishment since the 90s, or even the 60s, since after all it doesn’t take much to make a decade stand on its head around here, or so the pulsing pain in the back of her neck keeps telling her. They are all waiting alright, but they aren’t expecting her.""He’s not quite sure, now, about any of the dates. It’s too late for him. Every day is a Sunday on which he gets left behind."
Relationships: Albert Rosenfield & Albert Rosenfield's Double, Albert Rosenfield/Harry Truman, Diane Evans & Albert Rosenfield (Twin Peaks), Diane Evans & All the Diane Evans, Diane Evans & Doris Truman, Diane Evans & Tamara "Tammy" Preston, Tamara "Tammy" Preston & Albert Rosenfield
Comments: 39
Kudos: 8





	1. 1. Station (Monday, October 10th)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laughingpineapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/gifts).



> So. I would like to say this was written for Wonderful X Strange, but that would be a terrible lie: I've been working on this for almost a year.  
> This is a gift to thank laughingpineapple for getting me into exchanges, and for what she does for the fandom as a whole: I wanted to do something with all of your faves, I hope you like it.  
> And I would say it is my definite take on what I wish would happen after the final on the Blue Rose front.

**DIANE**

And the next Monday, she is back.

It’s almost funny, in a sense. That absurd impulse to cry “honey, I’m home”, even when she has no idea where she is, only a vague inkling of who she is, and an iron-bound yet unaccounted for certitude that she’s never once in her life called anyone “honey”.

It’s almost funny, because they aren’t expecting her, all those blurry faces standing in a police station that hasn’t seen any embellishment since the 90s, or even the 60s, since after all it doesn’t take much to make a decade stand on its head around here, or so the pulsing pain in the back of her neck keeps telling her. They are all waiting alright, but they aren’t expecting her. To be fair, since that’s what it’s all about, you can’t compete with someone who’s been polishing the art of escapism so thin you can actually see through him, right to his multiple reflections. Cooper always had a smile so shiny it left you a bit blind and light-headed, as if you’d been standing in the sun for too long. It’s no wonder no one concerned themselves with the murderous secretary in the back. Oh, what a disappointment she will be.

At the moment, admittedly, she feels like being unfair: not a minute of screen time in and she’s heading for the credits as fast as she can, pushing a few friends in the ditch along the way when she says no one’s expecting her. Truth is, she isn’t thinking about Cooper now.

Albert’s name is almost the first to come back, and with it a stabbing pain she hopes he will feel too when he hears the news. They all have their cross to bear.

There are other names then, stranger names ( _a girl’s name_ ), but Albert, yes, good, _old_ Albert. Not that he could have missed her, really. You have to be in an actual capacity to do so, and Albert is always indisposed. She doesn’t remember much, but she remembers this: Albert has been expecting, and only that, for so long, his muscles tensed in the same direction until he was bending backward over the rim of time only for the boomerang to curve and hit him in the back of his head.

Of course, she was the one to take the fall.

She shouldn’t be thinking about that now.

Twice in Twin Peaks, then. With no memory of the trip, only a blink of an identity, a bad cut on her right arm and a surprisingly real hangover. Let it not be said that time’s changed her, because she can already feel the word “fuck” spelling itself on the tip of her tongue, as comforting as the milk of human kindness, and more palatable.

Around her is a widening circle of the Sheriff’s station employees, who all recoil in panic when she manages to open her mouth to ask for a smoke. After a minute of general confusion, an irritatingly fastidious woman explains, in far more words than would have been necessary, that she can’t smoke in here, not since 2005, that maybe it’s for the best and that she’s going to fetch sheriff Truman, not the one who’s sick, the one who’s been called at the hospital because someone broke out during the night – or in, it’s unclear yet, because there was a broken window, but no broken glass to be found. And, eyeing the woman’s catastrophe of a perm – what year is this, really – she doesn’t even protest. She doesn’t really need that smoke. On the other hand, she would quite like to know why that person – ‘Lucy’, though how she knows that is beyond her – said at the end of her speech, her head corked somewhat affectionately: “It’s nice that your voice is still the same.”

Once the collective shock of having an outsider materialize in the middle of the break room has receded, they get her to sit in the station’s waiting room with a glass of water and the paracetamol she earned instead of a cigarette. This is the place, then. So many hours of tapes, and she never dared to think she’d be allowed to look at it with her own eyes. Seeing things in person always felt like a privilege to her, but she knows that feeling is mostly based on a web of bullshit. Really, she’s dying to have a chat with Gordon. Metaphorically speaking.

The man who’s apparently in charge of guarding her – Deputy Brennan, Lucy’s husband, – is working himself in a nervous frenzy, and has already offered her coffee, tea, and for some reason milk, three times in the last twenty minutes. Admittedly, no one is acting particularly relaxed around her, which has a sweet, enjoyable sense of familiarity. Except perhaps for the other deputy who, after observing her in silence for a while, comes closer and takes the opposite orange plastic chair. Looking straight at her, he states more than he asks:

“You’ve had a pretty long journey, haven’t you?”

This is a face you don’t want to contradict, but she has an inkling they will talk later. That is, if she doesn’t get sucked in by the linoleum or if, just throwing ideas around, Chet Desmond – remember Chet? – doesn’t suddenly decides he’d fancy a holiday and grabs her for some transcendental hopscotch. From what she can tell, she’s the eternal designated driver around here, and no one’s counting the miles.

There. This is the sort of wording – she must pay attention – that makes her both dizzy in fear and eager to see the whole place burn down. So. She may actually be angrier than she thought.

Incidentally, she may also be quite more herself than what they must be hoping for.

Soon enough, a man in a cowboy hat walks through the door, and they have to decide, so to speak, “if that’s the girl or not”. To be completely honest, now that her head is a bit clearer, she’s surprised they haven’t put her in a cell at once. A quarantine, long enough to make sure she isn’t anything to be afraid of, and maybe poke at her flesh a bit longer in curiosity. It’s the sensible thing to do, really. At least it’s what she would have done, and if someone is familiar with the Bureau’s procedures, it’s her – hours and hours of cross-reading to find the obligatory loophole that would cover for this or that fuck-up, and the rummaging through archives to ungodly hours every time Gordon stared at the wall for too long and an idea came to him.

But those people don’t ever seem to learn. As it is, they’re all dying to wrap her in foil blankets and chamomile scents, the perm woman hovering above her shoulders curiously, like she would like to touch her but doesn’t dare. Maybe that’s what Cooper was talking about when he harped on about small town hospitality. Maybe her concerns are ridiculous. But it’s always hard to tell what people will remember.

When he hears about what she looks like on the phone (and since being fair is all the rage, she has to admit it’s quite a description), Gordon only says ‘ _Not to the Great Western’_ , the words echoing in the sheriff office like a warning. Everybody immediately agrees, as if for once they could all point at an idea simultaneously and call it sane. He doesn’t ask to speak to her.

So the Trumans offer to take her in. They have a spare room, after all.

And on the whole, twenty-four or so hours later, she understands that decision brought with it the blessing of absolution. If it had been their intent to second-guess her, if they had been afraid, they wouldn’t have let her with Doris. Alone with Doris, mostly, since Frank is working all day and the hospital’s mysterious disappearance isn’t going to solve itself she hears, though personally she wouldn’t bet on it.

She spent the entire car ride with her face pressed to the window, filling Frank’s easy silence with postcards of great blue pines and strangely picturesque abandoned cars on the side of the road. Something in the light bothered her, fugitive sparks of colors in her vision.

But the real recognition came later on the porch, when she first saw Doris’s face, tense and flushed, her eyes spelling “you should have called first” in fiery letters. To her own surprise, she had to resist an urge to let her anger evaporate like the remnants of something that’s been forgotten in a corner. For simply by looking at her, she immediately learned that real anger, all of anger, was Doris’s thing and hers exclusively, any external source inevitably absorbed by her orbit and redistributed to her surroundings through perpetual movement.

She likes to think she knows a thing or two about formidable presence, and here was someone who came shrouded in waves of menace, only held together by a nervous energy so thick she could almost taste it. That was her counterpart, she understood, trying to get rid of the insistent impression she was wearing her clothes inside out, as Frank silently negotiated her admission inside the house, her Miss Twin Peaks of sort, the face of a town that had shred her to the bones and of which she knew next to nothing.

Still, a strange association.

By a predictable effect of symmetry, ever since she passed the door, Doris has been looking at her, is always looking at her, not quite certain what to make of her and clearly worried she’s going to explode in some way and ruin her painfully ordered living-room. She hasn’t make her pay for her sudden presence in her life, no matter how much she obviously planned to yell at Frank later. But one can tell the carefulness she has to display doesn’t come naturally: it gives Diane this unbearable feeling, like nails on a chalkboard, whenever she looks back.

After a couple of hours of circling her as if she was a wounded but slightly annoying bird, she settles for treating her like someone with a bad case of the flue.

“How do you feel,” she asks, as she eyes dubiously what must be her tenth glass of water of the day. That’s the sort of question nobody gives an honest answer to, even when they haven’t been shot in the last few days, but she discovers with some amazement she knows what to say, and has no desire to lie.

“Sad,” she smiles.

Doris raises her eyebrows sharply, and immediately turns away from her, as if admitting to sadness was somewhat obscene and it was shameful to have forced it out. If she had any energy left, she would have touched her shoulder and told her how it felt, how it really felt that someone finally asked her that. Or maybe it’s what she likes to tell herself, that she would have been capable of thanking Doris, of opening up to someone, be it that total stranger, but – and later on, when she knows a bit more, she will wonder how Doris has it in her, standing where she stands, to ask.

And of course, there was the question of her hair. No words were said on the subject, but she could tell Doris was deeply unsettled by it. There are no mirrors around here, but the car’s panel had caught the light at the right angle for a moment, and she could see her own reflection, or at least someone, looking back. Still, the image had an air of newness about it. Pretending to be unfazed is probably a thing of the past – now she can say ‘a thing of the past’ – and she has to admit she’s curious about it too.


	2. 2. Room (Tuesday)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Trumans do have a spare room. Doris says ‘alien abduction’.

They take good care of her, the Trumans. They dress her in Frank’s slightly grainy flannels and in Doris’s old sweat pants, wrap her in the softness of paid-up small town pavilion, and carefully put all the sharp objects away. She thinks the front door may be locked, though she didn’t check – and it probably would be too if it wasn’t for her. From time to time the phone rings and it’s either Frank, Gordon or that Preston girl, but never Albert, and never for her. She knows, for Doris’s answers and the ringtones get through the walls of her room.

It probably wasn’t such a good idea to put her there.

The spare room. Only it isn’t, not really. More like a museum for lost time, where very little has been moved for a period of time she can’t assess. There’s something in the still atmosphere, a blueprint for someone who isn’t there anymore. What bothers her is that she can’t recognize the decade the items surrounding her – clothes in the closet, toys, furniture – are supposed to make her feel nostalgic about. Abandoned teenage years in open boxes.

Of course she’s looked through everything as soon as she was left alone, which didn’t take too long: Doris barely glanced around and declared she had something to fix in the kitchen. It didn’t feel like she was intruding: in fact it may be what she’s here for now.

She’s found the official documents, the posthumous commendation, letters of condolences, some pictures. On the wall, just above the bedhead, hangs a very fake-looking diploma delivered to ‘Joshua Truman, for his notable catch of a 13 lb. rainbow trout, April 23th 1990’. She can’t say, off the top of her head, where she was in 1990, but in a few days, she thinks she might be able to.

The navy wallpaper is torn in places with white bullet holes of blutack, remnants of old posters, and those still in place form a timeline, telling the story of a child growing up. Above the bed, next to the diploma, WWF pictures of dolphins and bored pandas, vulnerable stags photographed in the open, a wide range of birds and horses looking at her, the incomprehensible terror of the wilderness burning in their eyes. From the desk and the piles of boxes, you can see the images change: superheroes, athletes, actors even. Normally she wouldn’t be one to complain about such an amount of shirtless men, but as the frieze progresses toward the cupboard, they are more often than not equipped with guns. From there to the bookcase, it’s only fatigues and helicopters, muscles on display, guns again. Chet Desmond – if those are even real memories – used to lean his averagely built frame against her desk, and state calmly that demonstrations of force always were attempts at hiding something.

“Don’t ever get into a fight with Chet”, Albert also told her once, very seriously, and she’d say, she’d say...

Yes. She remembers.

“I don’t fight, Rosenfield. You’re the one who keeps getting punched.”

She wonders where Albert is, just now.

There’s also a diary, not well hidden in a box below the mattress, its padlock torn off. The handwriting betrays a young owner, no older than twelve. On one page it reads:

“ _July, 17 th: Mom says I shouldn’t go out, because of what happened to that girl, again. But it was so long ago! This is so unfair _(underlined thrice) _. I don’t know why she keeps repeating that, Steve rides to the lake everyday, it’s an old story now._

_I tried and told her, I did. I said: “But I’m not a girl. Nothing will happen to me.”_

After reading it, she carefully buries the diary under a pile of old school notebooks.

She tries not to stare too much at the men on the wall and their secret, sticks to the dolphins and the bookcase where she finds volumes that are at least 30 years old and bear the initials H.T. inside their cover. Science fiction, all of them.

Of course, the biggest poster of all isn’t about tragic nature or triggers: it’s an old version of the “I want to believe” classic, right next to the door. That one, more than anything else in the room, makes something in her chest crumple every time she looks at it.

To fill the empty morning hours, while Doris sleeps, she reads _My Teacher is an Alien_ and its immortal sequel _My Teacher Fried My Brain_ – both extremely reasonable tales: the state of her brain is debatable at worse, but there goes any sort of faith in authority figures – and begins _The Diamond Age_. That one strangely stays with her, probably because it’s easy to relate to someone whose mother is named “Tequila”. She feels old enough to be her own mother, now. The thought is oddly comforting.

As she finishes the second chapter, the phone rings, and after a few muffle noises, the shouting begins. Must be Frank. The Trumans try rather hard not to argue in front of her, but she knew as soon as she first entered the house and saw the look on Doris’s face. God knows what Frank must have told her about the lost FBI woman and her surprise comeback. So far her cohabitation with Doris has been peaceful, save for the occasional outbursts about the decaying state of things, society, politics, and maybe the world – she has nothing to say to that anyway.

“Does it need to be bandaged, your arm?” Doris asks her later that afternoon. “I mean, it obviously does. God knows those incompetent at the station would never have thought of that. You stay right here. A scar this size…”

She’s obviously gained confidence, for up to now she never dared to risk direct questions.

“Is it a knife cut? Or a burn? It’s hard to tell.”

Doris’s face is hovering above her arm with an earnest sense of curiosity, trying to decide if she’s going to use gauze or band-aids to deal with the problem.

“Don’t worry about it,” Diane says quietly.

It’s apparently the wrong thing to say, because Doris shakes her head all the way to the bathroom, turning back only to point at her and declare solemnly:

“You’re just like Frank.”

And for a second it’s like there is nothing worse in this world, no greater crime on earth than to be just like Frank, and to deal with one’s wounds lightly.

Doris promptly comes back with a whole pharmacy and she has to let her bandage her arm to make up for her felony. She takes advantage of the fact that Doris is focusing on her work, her hair brushing against the thick flannel of her borrowed shirt, to get a good look at her.

It must be the hair – she likes it, the texture of it, fine and soft like frayed silk. There’s something almost tender under the annoyance, cracked and exhausted but there, palpable, as the white band goes round and round her arm. Maybe being just like Frank has some silver linings, too.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Doris comments with too much interest, as she entraps the wound.

There’s a special inflection in those words that awakens an old Pavlovian reaction. Whenever she heard something like that listening to a tape, it meant Cooper was about to get into trouble. It’s true the pattern of the wound is unusual; for now though, she refuse to bring herself to care. No matter if she’s marked for posterity, it’s a whole new world order in which we don’t jump into the abyss to hear what sound it will eventually make.

Apparently Doris hasn’t heard of it yet. But she isn’t Cooper either, which leaves this suddenly frightening question open: what is Doris like, when she’s authentically curious about something?

“How long were you gone?”

Heading straight for the million dollar questions, apparently.

“They say seven days.”

At least it’s not three. She wouldn’t have the patience to deal with that. Doris hesitates:

“Say, you wouldn’t… you don’t have any message, do you? Any message to give? From when you were away?”

For a moment, she doesn’t understand. Then she remembers the UFO poster from her room, and tries to adjust her image of Doris in accordance with that X-Files addition. She would laugh, truly, but it doesn’t strike her as such a good idea right now, and while she struggles to keep a straight face, she silently lists the parallels. Gordon had them learn the protocols by heart, she knows the typical pattern of an abduction story.

Doris is still examining her, and seems to be growing more worried as she does.

“You haven’t been...”, she begins, then thinks better of it and only waves in the general direction of Diane’s body. At least she doesn’t ask her if the aliens stole her teeth.

“I’ve been away, that’s all.”

It’s plain from Doris’s expression she thinks she’s being denied the obvious truth, which is probably what compels her to say after a beat:

“Those people you worked for… They seemed surprised to hear you were back. Hawk said there was no investigation. It’s so typical.”

She doesn’t bother to ask what is, Doris usually explains herself to the furniture after about any phone call from the station.

“If you’re not top brass, nobody ever gives a damn. I tell you, this government… Anyway the man they’re all looking for – Harry, you know Harry?”

She nods. For some reason, she remembers Twin Peaks, the enthusiastic recording of an ideal town lost in the misty mountains and firs that would make you believe traumatic murders were only the world balancing itself. She was used to Cooper’s fairy tales. After a while you wanted to believe them too. The food was good, the locals were nice, the law was enforced with caution and heart. Yes, she remembers Harry.

“Well, Harry spent all these years, searching… Like he was some sort of legend, you know? The agent who used to visit him, too. And officials, from time to time, Frank told me. All those people and when he returns he doesn’t even stop to say hi. If it was him at all. I mean after all this time, who can tell. You think you know a person...”

The bandage is a bit too tight, and the more agitated Doris grows, the more she wonders what she’s supposed to say. Not that it matters as it would in an actual conversation.

“Maybe they were right not to look for me.”

It’s the end of a thought, maybe the first one she had back in the station, looking at all those unknown faces.

“After all, I came back,”she adds, and immediately regrets it when she sees Doris’s face.

Instead of answering, she stops and turns her attention to the bandage, probably because she cannot bear to look at Diane anymore.

“God, this is a mess! I have to do it all over! It must hurt like hell, why didn’t you say so? I swear, the things they sell you...”

Her sore arm is set free and bandaged again in silence, each circle emphasizing that she should really consider not being so much like Frank, if she wants peace and an arm that is not blue.

When they are done, Doris condescends to acknowledge her again.

“They changed your hair too, didn’t they?”

It’s nice to finally have someone bring up the subject. She was beginning to wonder if she was imagining it.

On the previous night, when at last she found a mirror, she examined herself thoroughly – not in the way Gordon taught them to, but in her own intimate and increasingly proprietary way. From what she could gather, the blanks in her memories were maybe not so numerous, but she couldn’t for the life of her tell what color her hair had been when she was taken away. Not that it was an issue now, apparently, because her hair was literally _every_ color. Red, white, black, blue even, and greens, multiple shades, clashing together like it’s the mid 70s again, and sadly she doubts Twin Peaks has such a notable punk scene. It’s a psychedelic mess that makes her look like an avant-garde traffic accident, and no matter how many times she tried to wash it in the sink, it doesn’t give the first sign of wearing off.

“I don’t know.”

Doris hesitates again, and she wonders if she’s about to try to convince her aliens did indeed abduct her.

“Well, I had Lucy on the phone this morning – Lucy Brennan from the station, you know. She was calling about the funeral, but she also asked how you were doing, and she told me… She told me to tell you that ‘the hair is the dead part of the body’, or mostly dead, I can’t remember. And that you shouldn’t worry, because she was positive your voice was just the same as before, and that’s what matters. I think she mostly meant you can always alter it if it bothers you.”

Doris looks half-apologetic now, but it’s hard to tell what for. This is the second time in two days she has to deal with the fact that Lucy Brennan, from Twin Peaks Station, knows what she’s supposed to sound like. Her perm certainly was memorable, but she’s positive she’s never seen her before the previous day. Still, that’s not the main focus of her attention.

“What funeral?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's no way around it, Doris is an UFO enthusiast. I named the Trumans' son 'Joshua' because I don't think he has a name in canon: his death is only alluded at (we know he committed suicide out of war trauma, though), but this was so huge I needed to explore it.


	3. 3. Meditation (Wednesday)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diane tries to find her inner Diane, or something like that. What she finds is mainly time gone by. And a soap opera.

“How do you feel?”

Doris asks her regularly, with growing confidence. It sounds like it does her good too. It’s an idea she won’t be able to articulate before quite some time, but when she’ll have spend enough time at the Trumans’, she will come to believe that being around Doris makes it easier to tell what’s underneath that first layer of anger she tends to cling to when she manages to go past denial.

To understand how she truly feels has been her main occupation for the last three days. Slowly, painstakingly, she’s sorting herself out.

In any frame of reference, it’s not a pretty picture. Which is good, for she has been that too and wouldn’t wish it to anyone.

There’s not much to do, in the Trumans’ house. So everyday since she arrived she’s sat down and gotten down to work. It worries Doris to no end to see her cross-legged and still on the floor. Then again everything seems to worry Doris to some degree, from the gas cooker to the speed limitations.

It’s hard to ignore the comedy of it all: ‘the one and only Diane Evans’, sitting in the middle of a fish-themed living room, dressed in oversize yoga pants and used-up flannel, concentrating on the tiny fibers of the carpet under her palms. Slowly she presses her hands on the floor and releases her grip.

Phillip – Phillip is back in her head too, it seems – Phillip would remark that she’d better go around naked than to be seen in such an outfit. But Phillip certainly can’t see her – she’s almost sure she ran into him at least once, during her time away, but if she’s right clothes were a step out of his scope of preoccupations then.

She thinks of Dale’s relaxation techniques, discards the thought as if it contained a vintage vodka magnum and some fancy shot glasses, and tries to find a better image to keep in mind.

The gentle and sad face of a black-haired little boy fleetingly appears behind her lids, illuminated by fairy lights. This one is not real, she reminds herself, even if the small pang in her chest certainly is – it’s not your fault, she silently repeats.

Emotions don’t always align with solid matter and cohesive chronology, in the same way you don’t have to hit a brick wall to tell that something happened to you. Investing oneself in fiction is fine, it’s more than she could do at one point, better than investing in Zubrowka and cheap dates, better than investing in suburban real estate or in the FBI. At least this speaks to some part of her. But it’s not a reason to dwell on inherited memories, not when she can reach for real things. Real enough.

One hand going to her hair, she begins to massage her scalp, humming to stay focused. It’s windy outside, and she can hear a branch tapping the window. Doris always keeps everything closed.

She’s a city girl, that much is certain, and though she would like to believe there’s comfort to be found in nature, the difficulty in that is not lost on her. If there is, it’s certainly not in those woods. Not in the anonymous lighted street of a metropolis either. Not by the sea. For all she has traveled recently, the number of safe landscapes has drastically been reduced.

But she begins to think that limiting and contracting the places you actually wish to be in is a necessary sacrifice if you really want to be one person. In the end, she hopes the space will shrink to the shape of her body, stiffer and leaner than it was before.

She’s noticing it now. For two days, she has sat here on this carpet after lunch, and though the first time has been a blur, the second time she actually remembered the gestures, the flexing of the muscles, remembered in her bones how she used to sit down, how she lowered herself to the ground, and compared it to how she was doing it now. The outlines of the movement did not superimpose perfectly, and she wonders about the gap.

She thinks that if she repeats it enough times, she will get the hang of it, and sit in her body, in the middle of herself, without feeling slightly nauseous.

_Find your happy place._

‘Thanks a lot, our Holy Llama’, a voice that sounds like Albert dryly comments in her head.

She has to admit that, as far as one-liners go, it’s about as hilariously helpful as ‘Is it really you’, an old classic for broken times, and though she’s seen that movie before, she can’t help but remember there was no applause when she came back at curtain call.

But she’s getting distracted. Meadows, she decides, would be acceptable. Flat and green, nothing to hide. Meadows with a horizon line you can trace for miles, or a house on a Frisco hill that is just the right shade of yellow. Leaning on railings by the Golden Bridge, wearing sunglasses. Good job. There were actual things she liked.

An hour or two later, she breaks out of her trance to the sound of the attic staircase cracking. Not long after, Doris comes down, announcing triumphantly:

“I’ve found them. Not in the right place, because of course why would they be, but there. Those are a bit outmoded I’m afraid.”

She deposits a dust-covered card-box in front of her, that has ‘ _P_ _re-19_ _82_ _:_ _size_ _6_ _!_ ’ written on its lid. The clothes have been an issue, but she cares far less than Doris does, and she doesn’t know how to tell her she shouldn’t have her wear clothes that are this old, exactly this old. She knows the date from Joshua’s death certificate, has made the math. Size 6 indeed.

“Thank you. I’ll have a look,” she lies, fully intending to stick to Frank’s old shirts for her life, even if they make her look like a substandard coat rack and don’t protect her enough from the drafts of cold air that insinuate through what is, Doris insists, a badly fixed front door.

She manages to carry the box to her room on her own, although Doris never lets her do anything by herself and generally acts as if she’s going to disappear through the carpet, which is, she has to admit, a reasonable concern. It’s unfortunate, for she’s got an urge to touch, to feel her surroundings. Whenever she’s alone she lets her hands follow the flat surface of the walls, stands against the open door of the freezer for as long as she dares (and cleans the puddles afterwards before Doris worries about the pipes), lies down in the empty bathtub for hours. The weight of the box in her hands is like a gift.

Later that evening, she sits perched on a kitchen stool, having been forbidden to help, as Doris chops unidentified vegetables, when out of the blue the other woman declares:

“I’ve had Harry on the phone. He didn’t believe me when I said who you were. Said originally he wasn’t even sure you existed, before agent Rosenfield confirmed it. Seems like you are quite famous, though.”

It occurs to her that, for someone who’s been almost nothing but hostile to her husband and who often ends her numerous phone calls by calling whoever is on the line incompetent, Doris is surprisingly eager to engage her in conversation. Not eager to the point of letting her manipulate kitchen knives, but eager enough.

There’s an element of miracle in those mundane situations, though the interactions still require a level of concentration that leaves her exhausted, especially with the way Doris keeps casually resuscitating fragments of her past.

“I’m not really surprised”, she says, voice a bit low, “given how I’ve never really been here before. You can tell him I still have no more proof of his actual existence than he has of mine. From what I’ve heard back in the days, he sounded too good to be true.”

Doris chuckles, which almost makes her jump.

“Poor Harry. Well he says he regrets not being able to meet you in person.”

She hasn’t thought about those years yet, the Twin Peaks years, not properly. She can feel they must be at the core of that mental ball of yarn she’s patiently disentangling every afternoon on the carpet, but it’s too soon to embrace an experience she didn’t really have.

She knows Harry’s sick. It’s one of Doris’s favorite subjects to yell about whenever she calls Frank or the hospital.

“Was Albert here often? At the time? Agent Rosenfield, I mean.”

Doris’s back stiffens a bit.

“Here, no. I’ve barely ever set eyes on him, really. He always went straight to Harry, and that was before we lived here. In and out of town in a flash. He never stayed.”

The grumbling that follows sounds like “never good enough for him, go figure”, and her chopping becomes a bit more aggressive.

“Frank will be late,” she announces after a while. “We’d better eat without him. It’s just as well, anyway, _Invitation to Love_ will be on in fifteen minutes. I can catch you up, if you want.”

She has no idea what Doris is talking about, and doubts she can catch her up on the last twenty years, but the way her eyes light up tells her she might want to give it a go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's to you all, Invitation to Love enthusiasts.


	4. 4. Stranger (Thurdsay)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tammy visits, with a lot of questions. Diane has even more answers.

The next day, there’s another phone call that she can’t help but eavesdrops on, for the person on line somehow manages to rub Doris up in a spectacular way: her voice is entirely different, almost friendly.

“Someone from your team is going to visit,” she tells her afterward, and she immediately knows it’s neither Albert nor Gordon. Though she doesn’t say it, Diane can clearly see ‘it’s about time, too’ written on Doris’s face.

And soon enough, she finds herself staring at the poised face of Special Agent Tamara Preston. In other circumstances it wouldn’t be a terrible face to stare at, quite the contrary, but she is currently learning about the importance of context. Right now, standing elegantly in the living room, she’s little more than a perfect flag bearer for the institution.

She prepared for this. She had to yield and fish Doris’s old jeans out of the box, because something in her rebelled at the idea of meeting with Preston in yoga pants, like a lamb to slaughter. It was impossible for her to let go of the flannel, but she did her best, tying knots and stuffing shirt tails into those 80s denims, willing her fashion abilities back into existence. She got her second wind rolling those sleeves and finding something sufficiently high-waisted for her purpose. A generous dose of stolen make-up, and she had her armor of sorts, something to cling to.

She’s glad she did the effort, gathering her wits and forcing them back into a boiling pool of anger to keep herself together, because Preston’s even managed to convince Doris she needs to be out of the house while she conducts the interview. It confirms that girl is damned good with more than a gun, and the prospect of being alone with her is utterly terrifying.

Preston smiles smoothly and pauses for a second before extending her hand to her, explaining:

“Sorry if it’s redundant, but just to be sure. I’m Special Agent Tammy Preston. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Ms Evans.”

What it really is, is a direct blow to her stomach, and she wonders briefly if she’s going to be sick. Here she was, thinking she was doing rather well given, once again, the circumstances.

But she has to focus if she doesn’t want to end up as the FBI’s new guinea pig, or worse, as Gordon’s new _prodigy_.

“Sorry to disappoint, but we’ve met before, Agent Preston,” she snaps. “I’m sure you remember. Or should I be concerned?”

It’s not entirely true, but she does remember bits and pieces of her time undercover, the important bits, she would wager. Otherwise, it was like looking at dark silhouettes in the night from a passenger seat. Until it wasn’t.

Preston’s mouth forms a perfect circle, and her eyes light up as she takes out a recorder and a glossy notepad from her handbag.

“So you remembers, then. Fascinating.”

It’s painfully obvious she’s refraining to explain why, in great details. Diane has half a mind to call Doris and tell her the FBI agent she left her with has deactivated the fire alarm.

“That’s not compliant with what we know of the way those things work. But it goes to show we’re mainly in the dark. Which is exactly why your help would be invaluable.”

She takes a long, hard look at the recorder Preston has eagerly grabbed.

“It’s important that I get your words right, it’s a matter of...”

“No.”

The other woman doesn’t argue. She hopes Gordon is paying her well, he probably doesn’t know how much of an ace he has recruited. She’s probably wearing a wire anyway, but it’s a matter of principles. A wire and a holster, somewhere.

The notebook replaces the recorder, earning Preston another eloquent look.

“It’s for my personal use only,” she clarifies as Diane raises an eyebrow. “Gordon wants me to stay in town for a bit and investigate the consequences of your disappearance. And Agent Cooper’s, of course. I talk with as many people as I can.”

Oh, the consequences. Surely with method and the correct set of data, we can begin to estimate the _consequences_. She wishes she was dressed in Prada and killer heels, all wrath and pearls, just so she could look down on the whole FBI, and ask nonchalantly about their success rate.

“Trust me, sometimes not getting to know the territory is a fucking advantage.”

Preston’s smile is clipped now, but she doesn’t lose her calm expression.

“He mentioned it too. But I don’t think I’m very susceptible to small town’s charm, to be honest. And I don’t think you are, either. Besides, the only big event right now is a funeral, which is rather telling.”

Her eyes turns to the stuffed fishes on the wall, and for the first time since she entered the house she seems not to fully know what she should say.

“What do you want from this, agent Preston,” she takes the chance to ask, coldly.

The woman’s expression quickly shifts back to utter professionalism, and the smile reappears. It takes a moment to reach her eyes.

“Please, call me Tammy.”

Tammy. She tests it dubiously in her mind, and decides there is no way she can do this.

“Where’s Albert?”

The smile freezes. There it is. The black hole in the protocol.

“He thought… perhaps you wouldn’t want to see him so soon. Perhaps it wouldn’t help.”

She tells herself to breathe, to mind her back, to remember the carpet. Her stomach feels cold now.

“Oh, so they decided to send you instead? Well that’s a fucking relief, isn’t it?”

And in that moment, observing the lack of embarrassment on Preston’s face, she understand she’s not going to apologize to her, hasn’t even thought about it. Her tone gets even harsher.

“Look, if you want a report about everything Dale Cooper, I can’t do that for you. You’ve been told the whole sordid story I believe, back in Buckhorn. There is no update, except that Dale Cooper is a fucking idiot, and this isn’t going to make headlines, trust me.”

Even now, she can’t shake the feeling that Tammy is gauging her, listing her strong points and weaknesses and grading her, mentally filling her case up for later examination.

“I’m not here for Dale Cooper,” she states calmly, her gaze never faltering. “I’m here for you. I believe there is a lot you can tell us.”

She refrains from pointing out that last time she told them something, it didn’t go well. She doubts anyone from this team will ever truly listen to her. Apart from Albert, but she can’t even be sure of that now.

Tammy leans forward and her face lights up again with a sense of curiosity that could be Blue Rose’s trademark. Only this particular manifestation feels more layered, like her interest is of a slightly different nature than the one Diane learned to recognize in a crowded Philly office. Not that it will save her.

“For example,” she offers, “you can tell me how it is.”

There is no explanation needed: it’s clear enough, what she’s asking, and so huge a million yoga sessions wouldn’t begin to defuse it. She sighs, counts the seconds. Looks at Tammy again.

“What do you expect that is so grand it’s worth more than fighting drug traffic and keeping your name tag attached to your body?”

She doesn’t say that maybe she should have asked before she decided to shoot her like all those black silhouettes that got her an A in training at Quantico. Doesn’t ask if the woman whose heart she instinctively aimed for in that room was anything more than one of those, or if she, in her surreal 80s outfit, is now. Doesn’t point out nobody asked her what she intended to do with her own gun, then.

“Whatever you think you’re looking for, that’s not it,” she concludes, and is baffled to see Tammy’s eyes widen in restrained delight. It’s unclear if the woman really is unfazed, of if she’s heard it all before.

“Are you quoting someone? It feels like you are. I could sense quotation marks here.”

For fuck sake, can’t you listen to me, she wants to yell. She can’t. Tamara Preston is obviously made of something tougher than she is.

“Phillip Jeffries. Great agent, fantastic suits. He used to say this a lot. And then he disappeared. So. I’d say pick up your battles wisely, agent Preston. The whole force has been holding its breath over that question for so long you may find out one day you’re the only one left.”

For some reason, this finally seems to get to Tammy. Her face clouds over, but she finds her footing almost immediately, stretching back before sprawling in her armchair, cat-like and elegant:

“It’s been a while, Ms Evans. They shot a whole range of TV shows on the dangers of seeking the truth out there. I’ve done my homework. Give me a little credit.”

Granted, she doesn’t remember the few days she spent with Tammy like she was actually there, but it feels like something has changed nonetheless. Something must be happening, for her to be suddenly so confident. It occurs to her she might be right. It’s been a while. She wonders what she missed.

“Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you a few simple questions, and I want you to answer them without thinking too much about it. If you do need to think, I want you to tell me. Every detail could be useful.”

She doesn’t give her time to react before she shifts and leans in again, voice even and unsparing:

“Who are you?”

She waits for a bit, to see if it affects her. It doesn’t.

“Diane Evans.”

This is actually a lot. She would be proud of herself if she wasn’t feeling so dizzy.

“When were you born?”

“10th of February. 1967.”

Tammy checks something in her notepad, frowns.

“What about December, 25th?”

Except for the obvious reason, it doesn’t ring any bell.

“I don’t know. What about it?”

“Probably nothing then,” Tammy sighs, turning a page. “Profession?”

“Long-suffering typist and answering machine for a yelling lunatic and his boys. That was years ago, but I quit again I guess something like four days ago. Gordon wouldn’t know about it because he’s a damned coward who sends newbies in his place.”

Tammy seems momentarily amused, but hides it quite well.

“Children?”

The living room fades, and the brown eyes of a sad boy meet her gaze. She blinks.

“No, thanks.”

She’s got a feeling Agent Preston is quite on the same page here – her noting is almost appreciative. When she raises her eyes again, she’s expectant.

“Sister?”

There is something on the tip of her tongue, buzzing, metallic. She takes a breath but no air gets in. Half. She wants to say “half”. Opens her mouth, closes it. Grabs her right arm, tries to breathe again. This time she’s more successful and it suddenly dawns on her she actually doesn’t want to say the word at all. Doesn’t need to.

Watching her silently, Tammy seems to ponder something, before shutting her notepad briskly. She isn’t prepared for the force of her jump, and the look she gives her is the most human she’s had so far, so much that she could see some hope there, if she wasn’t so busy focusing on her feet, her hands, anything attaching her to anything.

“Let’s try something else,” she says gently as she rises up, and begins to pace behind the armchair. One could wonder – but again, circumstances – how she manages it, high heels seemingly indifferent to the thick carpeting.

“I will tell you a story. Your story, Ms Evans. And if you hear any mistake, if anything sounds odd, please stop me immediately.”

She knows this one. She’s seen Gordon use it on the team on numerous occasions. Toward the end, he never met with Jeffries without opening with “Alright Phillip, it’s your bedtime story”.

“Shoot,” she says with a wobbly Cheshire grin, trying to drown the pain in venom. The ache in her chest is piercing.

“Your name is Diane Evans, you were born on… February 10th, 1967, in the Bay area, to Candy Evans. Your father left when you were young, and your sister Jane was...”

“I don’t have any sister.”

It’s Tammy’s turn to pause and raise a perfectly drawn eyebrow, before scibbling something down frantically.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes.”

She is now, at least. There was a red door, heavy and resistant, but eventually she got in that ugly pavilion. And so, she doesn’t have a sister anymore.

Tammy taps her nails on her notepad, and it feels like someone’s knocking on her brain.

“You were originally trained to be a nurse but you quit after a year to...”

“Look,” she raises a hand to stop her. “I think it’s enough. I know the procedures too. I’ve said my piece, you’ve got your weird evidence and whatever vague shape of an answer you want, we’re done. Now I just want to know what you intend to do with me. If you ask me, the Bureau owes me a fucking alimony and a pat on the head, since after thirty years of working for you like a faithful dog, you can’t decide if I really exist. Since you like quotes, here’s one from the boss himself, directly from the 80s, a piece of his old managerial technique: “A secretary is not a toy”. If you could remind him for me.”

Tammy sighs before putting her notes down and walking to her armchair again. Sitting down, she considers her carefully for a few seconds. This is still an evaluation, she’s sure, but this version of agent Preston glows a bit less, seems a bit more in touch with whatever is currently happening inside Diane’s chest.

“Do you know how old Gordon Cole is, Ms Evans?”

“Depends. What year is this?”

Mostly, she’s just being uncooperative. Quotations and all, Gordon was always from another time. In her ripped memories, he has only one face – and in that he might be the only stable person she knows.

Tammy pinches her lips together and says:

“Director Cole isn’t going to stay in this function for much longer. There will be a new task force, we believe – that is, Director Bryson believes, we talked this morning. This case has brought to our attention a few people of talent we might wish to collaborate with, people who could approach things from a slightly different angle.”

She wonders how much new agents who aren’t primarily looking for lost sheep would be able to understand. She knows she doesn’t want to, and for now it’s hard to tell if the FBI should be more like her or if she, once again, should be less like Frank.

“Director Bryson?”

Oddly enough, though she told Doris she was sad, she never felt like crying before. But to learn Denise has made it, and that she wasn’t there to see it… Here there are, the things she has missed. So much time no one will be paying her back, promises that weren’t kept. The debt is so huge her anger sags for a moment, before she can let out a weak:

“Only reassuring thing I’ve heard in a long while.”

The smile Tammy gives her is a real one this time.

“There are now thirty-seven women agents working in our department,” she says with the intonation of someone who’s been asked to give far too many presentations about it. “And I think she would like to hear from you.”

Amazingly, it does sound like a good idea. After all, when you were looking for a sense of your true self, Denise Bryson seemed to be the person to ask. Denise Bryson though; not Director Bryson.

“I’m sure. But I’m not coming back, Agent Preston. I’m done with terrible sequels.”

Tammy chuckles to a probable inner joke, and rummages in her bag while she explains:

“I thought you might be. That is, in one of the possible scenarios. I do, however, have one last question for you, and after that, I promise we will let you in peace. You worked for the Bureau, you have a legal identity and I personally don’t think you pose any threat – this was never a pressing issue, after what we witnessed at the station. Of course, we might want to keep record of your location in the future, mostly to make sure nothing happen to you.”

She refrains to point out those things usually worked like a quantum leap: when the FBI was paying attention to you, things began coming your way.

“Spare me the morbid details and ask the damned question.”

“Did you know Margaret Lanterman?”

“No. Well, the name rings a bell. Should I?”

“The funeral I mentioned. It’s hers.”

“Oh. Yes, Doris… Mrs Truman told me about it, but it wasn’t the clearest story I’ve heard. Why would I know her, then? Four days here don’t make a citizen of honor.”

“That’s what I’d like to know, in fact. Because she left you something.”

Tammy’s hand is still in her bag, as she observes her reaction.

“She...what? I suppose we’re not talking real estate and safe keys here?”

“No. It’s a note. Deputy Chief Hawk found it in her possessions. Your name was on it, well, not only that.”

She hands her a simple white envelope, on which “Diane Evans” has been scribbled in a shaky handwriting. Underneath, a rather schematic drawing of a woman’s head: the face has been left blank, but the hair is carefully colored with crayons of various shades. The general effect, while naive, is strangely moving.

She meets Tammy’s eyes briefly before opening it. It’s a simple piece of paper, with only a few words on it. She reads it. Then she reads it again.

“We didn’t open it,” Tammy says after a while. It’s such an obvious lie she actually lets out a strangled laugh.

“I should hope you did, it’s your damned job. I… What is this supposed to mean?”

“I was rather expecting you to told me.”

Her eyes travel from the paper to Tammy and back to the paper again, and she can’t help but think Doris would be thrilled that she’s finally been awarded her very own message.

“There were other envelopes, right? It’s not just me?”

“We don’t know for certain. She left various things to locals, but I wasn’t allowed to have a look.”

She doesn’t feel well. It’s been pretty clear since the moment the girl set foot in the house, but she’s only fully acknowledging it now. Hoping she will manage not to vomit in front of Tamara Preston and her tailored suit, she whispers incredulously:

“I can’t be the only one.”

The other woman stays silent at that. It is as if she still wants to know, and it leaves her with a sense of disgust so deep her stomach might be turning inside out. Her voice is shaking when she finally answers.

“I think... If this was addressed to me, only to me, I think you might want to remember that. If you want to stay in that field, it might… it might serve. For the rest, anything else I might add won’t help you. It says what it says. I honestly have no hope you actually understand this. But if you do, well, you might stand a chance. Now get the fuck out of here.”

And true to her word, Tammy does exactly that. She can’t really tell if the little nod she gives her before stepping out of the house is condescending or reverent, or a strange mix of both.

Once she’s alone, she allows herself let go and curls up on the carpet, knees against her chest, exhausted. The fibers of the fabric are rough against her cheek. She stares at the note that has been abandoned on the floor next to her, taking in one shaky letter after the other, over and over again. It’s there, plain and simple, in the middle of the living room.

“ _One day the sadness will end.”_

“So, how was it?” Doris asks expectantly the second she comes home, carrying an armful of Home Depot bags. She stands up hurriedly, not wanting to be caught in this humiliating position, and only has time to open her mouth before a swift gush of wind suddenly blows from behind Doris as she steps inside, and the front door slams like a shot.

The room goes black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That one time Tammy was the only one to get a passably good time out of a series of unfortunate events.


	5. 5. Waters (___)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here comes the trauma. And most of the cameos. And all of the Dianes.

_Diane, if you ever get up here…_

Diane

_Diane, if you ever get up here –_

Something is dripping. All over her. Everything is wet. Some time ago, someone screamed.

/

There was a moment, back at the motel. She had gotten out of that room, closed the door, and when she had turned around the car was still there, and the red-haired woman waiting for her behind the wheel. She had taken a second to think idly that it was nice to share a face with someone who seemed to know where she was at. Sticking her head out of the window, the other her had asked if she could give her a ride.

“Where to?”

“You need to ask,” the woman had smiled, somewhat sadly.

She had wondered for a moment, fastening her seat belt. It was only an impression, something in the corner of her eyes, but she thought that behind her, the backseat of the car was far more packed than it seemed.

Then she had smiled back, and given the location.

/

A luxurious condo in an anonymous city. She had knocked, and a woman with white hair had appeared, draped in a satin robe that proclaimed to the world there was nothing left to care about. She had taken a long look at her, and smiled a broken smile of relief. No questions were asked. She had poured her a drink and barely left her anytime to touch it before throwing herself at her, kissing her harshly, with a sense of desperation and a clinging violence, breathing the air out of her, taking and taking. When she had finally managed to push her away, she was gone entirely. She was alone in the flat.

/

Jane’s household deserved to be broken in. It was mortgaged on lies. But she was angry still.

/

Another car, in a sunny street. This time it was a white convertible, and the girl sitting in it had smiled at her so brightly, her hair so blond, she almost had to squint her eyes. There was a joy in that smile she longed to recognize.

The sky got suddenly obscured by the passage of a flock of birds, and the girl watched them in reverence. When the sun came back, she leaned toward her and asked conspiratorially:

“Are you here for the mystery?”

/

A shabby bar, in which she sat next to a black-haired woman, who had immediately addressed a cryptic signal to the waiter. He had limped as fast as his artificial leg let him, bending his tall body over the shaker before putting an elaborate cocktail in front of her.

“On the house,” he had said. “These are hard times.”

The drink was thick, yellowish with strips of white slowly decanting against the glass.

“What’s this,” she asked the woman.

“He just told you,” her voice was raspy, breathless, older that her face. Obviously she was already well into her own drink. “Hard Times.”

She spared another look for the repulsive concoction, before turning her attention back to her neighbor, who was starring at the counter so hatefully it seemed ingrained in the lines of her face, her expression stuck. She wouldn’t return her gaze.

After what felt like hours, weary of trying to catch her eyes, she snatched her glass and tipped it until the content cascaded on the floor with a sickening sound. Immediately, the woman screamed in rage and pounced on her. They rolled down, fighting, biting each other, until her fingers found themselves pressed against the other woman’s face, and suddenly there was no one left to fight.

/

Woods, thick and dark but pierced by so many rays of light it looks like she’s running through a giant spiderweb. She’s running in a straight line, almost out of breath, terrified. There’s something behind her. Something huge. A tree rustles on her left, and a woman with purple locks tied in a pony tail almost collides with her. She’s running too, but she doesn’t seem afraid: in fact, her face lights up when she recognizes her.

“Oh thank God it’s you! I’ve been looking everywhere. I meant to tell you: I’ve got a plan. Let’s go!”

They sprint through the light side by side, and the thing is still there, still crunching trees in their back, but now she can feel the current of air between the two of them, the speed and the presence comforting her.

“Don’t worry,” the woman smiles, a little breathless. “It’s only a monster.”

And she winks. They run. She’s glad she’s not doing this on her own.

/

They were many others. And a place by the sea. She remembers the waves. A woman in a pink dress, asking about rabbits as if it was a joke. A waitress in a suffocating diner, adamant to feed her waffles. A commander about to crash her ship. She was always good at holding her breath.

/

A thing on the ground, crawling in the dirt. Just a thing, without a face, howling, screaming insults at her as she approaches, blood pouring from its mouth. Words she wouldn’t even know how to pronounce, like a foreign language but understandable still, slashing through her with so much force and disgust she vomits, near the vibrating thing.

It’s crying, isn’t it? It’s wailing and spitting at her, accusing her, throwing a thousand deaths at her, cursing her out of existence, reaching through her flesh, through her eyes, her chest with the longest, filthiest hand, grabbing the back of her head and pulling it forward until it replaces her face, yelling she’s nothing, nothing, nothing, acres of skin to paper over the walls, pounds of dough to knead and munch and roll over the kitchen table and punch until all the air is out, a heap of mud to be trampled on until it’s just a crust of fucking, fucking nothing. On and on and on.

But she’s still there, she realizes. The circle of words is rolling on itself, and she’s standing outside of it, watching the thing until it’s only weeping, finally shutting up. Then she takes a few steps forward in the smoky room, ignoring echoes of the convenient store underneath, and places a hand on its back.

/

She has forgotten a lot. But not the green-haired woman. She seemed somewhat older, sitting serenely in what vaguely looked like a lab.

“Hello,” she had said. “We’re waiting for test results.”

She had smiled in a knowing sort of way, as if there was no riddle that could unsettle her, and no results she hadn’t already analyzed.

“I’m supposed to tell you you’re allowed two phone calls.”

She had paused, and raised her eyebrows suggestively at something right behind her left shoulder.

It was an old phone, black and heavy with a rotary dial. The first time, she didn’t call anyone in particular. Only held the receptor against her ear and waited, feeling the plastic on her skin, until she heard breathing at the other end of the line. She listened for while in silence, emotions stuck in her throat, as it progressively turned into a soft hum, the notes of a birthday song.

Eventually, a voice said: “Thank you for calling.”

There was a click, and she was left alone with the tone.

The second time, she slowly dialed a number. Immediately, someone answered her:

“You’ve reached Echo River Central Exchange, Poppy speaking. Let me transfer you to my colleague. And remember: always ride those waves!”

A click later, she was greeted by a calm “Sheriff’s Department, what’s your emergency? I see. Two five three, three oh six, copy that.”

She was transferred again, this time to a high, friendly voice:

“Hello, you’re still at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Station, but you’ve been transferred from the standard to me, that is Lucy, Lucy Moran by the front door in the booth on the left when you come in the building, so you’re not at the end of the corridor on the right, you see, in the big room, but behind the glass panel, the gray counter with the beige phone. I hope it’s okay. How can I help you?”

She was beginning to think it was a long chain of women to reach a single idiot, but she knew exactly what to say, suddenly filled with confidence.

“Diane Evans, I work with Agent Cooper. Could you...”

A loud gasp cut her short, as Lucy exclaimed in wonder:

“Oh! Oh, I’m so happy to hear from you! But how can you be calling? I always pay close attention, and whenever agent Cooper speaks to you, it’s always with that recorder he keeps, and not on the phone, so I thought maybe you didn’t like phones, or maybe he’s the one who doesn’t, because after all he’s so busy here that maybe he hasn’t got any time for answers. We’ve got an answering machine too, but it never seems to work, and people always forget to leave a name. Anyway, it’s so nice to hear your voice!”

“Look, I’m sorry but could you pass me Agent Cooper? It’s rather important. Urgent, even.”

“Of course, let me check. Andy just left, so I think they are in Sheriff Truman’s office now, you know about Sheriff Truman?”

“Yes, yes of course. Can you also put me on speakers?”

“On speakers? I’ll do it, it’s the green button, the one next to the light, just a moment. I’m transferring you again, to the office, it’s at the end of the left corridor, don’t worry you’ll be just fine. It was great talking to you, Ms Evans. You know, I think you may be right about phones. They can be rather confusing at times. You think you’re saying something, and then the line goes blank, or the other person doesn’t hear at all what you are saying, and they understand something else entirely, and then they answer that second thing and maybe you’ll misheard too. It’s happened to me before. So the speakers may be a good idea, because Sheriff Truman will be able to hear you, and if Agent Cooper doesn’t get what you mean, I’m sure he will help. He’s very good with phones.”

She couldn’t help but smile into the receiver. In other circumstances, her patience would have run thin after five words of conversation, but somehow, there was something soothing in the careful way her interlocutor was dissecting reality and guiding her through it. Something familiar.

“I’m sure he will. Thank you Lucy.”

Though she didn’t add anything, the glow at the end of the line was almost tangible, coming out in waves.

“Goodbye then, I’m transferring the call.”

Silence for a moment, then the slightest sound of a button being pressed. It’s only a few meters to walk, from the front desk and then to the left, but she didn’t remember this office at all. Hearing the silence transform into white noise, she took a deep breath, tried to find the words and to ignore for a while everything else burning on her tongue.

“Dale? Dale, it’s me. I hope you can hear me. I would have called sooner, but frankly it’s your own fault. Listen, there’s something I need to tell you. And you will have to pay attention for once in your life, Coop, for there is no tape in this thing, we’re doing it live, do you understand? I’m never sure you really do. Here:

When she ended the call, she let everything go with the weight of the phone. There. Never again.

_Dale, if you ever get up here..._

Diane

/

Diane

Something is dripping on her face. Water, everywhere, and she recognizes the texture of the carpet between her fingers but not the number of fingers, not the number of arms. A wet hand is pressing on her chest, the whole world is flooded inside and out.

The additional arms are clinging to her, rocking her back and forth to a broken old tune, an anguished lullaby she may have heard before, a song from a time long gone. It’s like being underwater, immersed and whenever you move, water moves with you.

She tries to breathe but there is hair in her mouth, and another mouth pressed against her head, the broken humming interspersed with “ohgodohgodohgod” and the voice is as wet as her, as wet as the arms that hold her there, folded on the carpet as if she could ever be small again, a little ball of herself huddled next to a knocked-over porcelain bowl.

There is hair sticking to her face too, but as she struggles to open her eyes, she sees it’s not purely her own: locks yellow as corn and long as fairy tales, like she thinks her own hair used to be once upon a time, when she was a soft young thing. They are trapped in the trails tears have left on her cheeks, mingling with her own in a puddle of worn-out despair.

She’s still crying. It was her mouth that screamed, she thinks, as she opens and closes it, gaping like a convulsing fish. And from above, from the sky or the ceiling, more tears are falling onto her, landing in her open mouth and in her neck. Doris is crying too.

“You’re here, you’re here,” she keeps saying, holding her in the middle of the dark, widening circle of water that keeps spreading through the fabric of the carpet, as if that modest bowl had contained gallons of liquid, a bottomless reservoir of sadness.

She did ruin that living-room after all.

Doris doesn’t seem to mind, the walls trembling as she puts some weight on her arms, on her legs, to push her through the water, to bring the air back into her lungs through pure muscle force, through one more convulsion. And it’s 1982 again, that nameless thing that happened in 1982, in 1967, it really doesn’t matter does it, like the size of clothes or posters on the wall or the color of her hair, none of it matters because Doris is saying ‘it’s okay, it’s okay’ like she’s forgiving her.

Another scream, but there’s no telling whose pain it is anymore.

“You’re back”, once more fishing her out of the sea and pulling her against her, until she feels like the beginning of a person again.

She cries until the bullet that never touched her body is out, until everything that is not her own is out, out out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An Unfortunate Series of Evans.


	6. 6. Friend (Friday)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albert finally visits, and finds Doris at the door. Difficulties ensue.

When she wakes up the following day, every door in the house has been taken out of its hinges. Doris is on the phone with the hospital, having an extremely technical and agitated conversation with some innocent intern over the particulars of panic attacks and post-traumatic syndrome. 

When she sees her there’s a moment of stillness in her face, but she quickly recovers and mouths ‘they don’t know what they’re about’ loudly enough for it to be heard at the other end of the line. And somehow it makes things right for now, as right as they can be.   
As she shakily goes for the coffee machine, she hears Doris yell at the doctor, hang up and immediately launch in another phone call to Agent Preston which involves, as expected, even more yelling.   
There’s something different sticking to her cheek, and she needs to see her own face, to check if anything’s changed. When she woke up there was a patch of wet hair on the left side of her head, the ending point of a watery path from the corner of her eye. The lock’s texture is not what it used to be.   
Bending over the dish rack, she tries to examine her reflection in one of Doris’s shining pan while its owner is busy graphically describing what she will do to the next FBI agent who dares to set foot in her house.   
Frank must have had a hell of a breakfast, she thinks as she catches sight of her temple in the polished steel. A warm feeling spreads in her stomach, something like relief. The lock of hair is tired and soft to the touch, and it has turned gray. Grayish, maybe, for you can tell it belongs to someone who used to be sort of blond, sort of brown-haired, sort of messed up to the roots and back, but it’s alright now. It will be.   
When Doris steps into the kitchen, mollified by 15 minutes of insulting every government agency that comes to mind, she even thinks they will be able to drink down their uneasiness along with caffeine.   
And then, Albert calls. 

She can tells it’s him almost immediately, because after all these years she recognizes his social pattern, from the moment people turn from polite to astonished to the moment they start to yell – and to Doris’s credit, she gives it only a two-seconds gap.   
“And now you! It’s a damned Federal party! Haven’t you heard what I told the other one, I’m done, we’re done with you, I don’t have to hand you the keys and wait for you to wreck everything. And where the hell have you even been? Do you have any idea what that poor girl went through? Oh I think you do – no, you will listen, if Harry was here, I swear… oh yeah? When was the last time you actually… No, she’s staying with me. I left her with your colleague for barely two hours, and the second I walk in it’s fucking Guantanamo! I don’t care what Frank told your lot because as long as I’m standing in it, it’s my house too. If you were so interested, maybe you wouldn’t have wasted so much time running after that man.”  
She’s getting so worked up that the hand Diane gently puts on her arm makes her jump. She presses it with purpose, to let her know it’s okay, ‘I don’t want a repeat of yesterday, and he’s a piece of’, but she nods again, insists. Doris ultimately sighs and barks over the phone:  
“Fine, have it your way, but I will be here and at the first sign of trouble you will find exactly how hard your badge is to swallow.”  
She hangs up without listening to the beginning of a shouted answer. 

It’s Doris who opens the door when he rings, and at first glance she can tell he has a ready-made tirade on his lips, but before he can open his mouth, Doris snaps:  
“No guns in my house.”  
It’s the same sentence she addresses to Frank every night when he comes home. God knows where he stores his service weapon. But she knows this: in her room, there is a picture of Doris and Joshua at a skeet shooting. 

Albert pales. For a split second, it looks like he’s going to fall down there and then, on the threshold. He raises a hand to his face, pressing the brink of his nose, and her heartbeat leaps as she suddenly considers that maybe she isn’t doing as well as she thinks she is.   
But then he spots her across the corridor and it becomes clear enough that this, whatever it is, is not her doing, not in the way she feared it could be.  
They stare at each other over Doris’ shoulder for a moment. Strange how she yearns to let herself think it’s him, that it’s really him even when she should know better about soppy pick-up lines. She’ll accept to be wrong if that means she’ll never have to nip her own joy in the bud again.   
The face she used to know has hollowed, absented itself, his jaw receding like his bite has been taken away. Age. She only remembers a younger Albert. But time doesn’t always chops off bits out of you.   
“I don’t… for fuck sake. I don’t have time for this,” he manages.  
Doris moves in front of him with the inevitability of a landslide before slowly, deliberately repeating herself. After a beat she adds, in the same voice she uses to confront Frank:  
“It’s a wonder to see you in the flesh. Are we finally good enough for you?”  
There’s something to this scene that reminds her of watching Invitation to Love without having seen a single episode in her life, while next to her on the couch Doris gasped and laughed and shouted at the characters. Albert and Doris having a shared past isn’t something she ever expected to have to comprehend. Especially since Albert is looking at her as if he can’t bear to remember.   
“Look, I don’t know what role you think you play here, and frankly I don’t care. I’ve dealt with people whose brains were more clotted than a 78-hours deceased trepanee, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last, so kindly do that outfit a favor and be one with the proverbial flowers on your wall.”  
The insult instantly brings her back to Philadelphia in the early 90s, listening to arguments through the office’s panels as she tried to finish typing that autopsy report; for a fleeting second, it almost feels good.

The shouting match that ensues is brief but spectacular. If she found herself inexplicably distressed by Doris and Frank’s arguments, this is somehow worse. At least it has the effect of bringing back the Albert she once knew, the one she remembers, but the performance is forced.  
“...high-security matter, if by some small miracle that word hit something between your ears, and all obstruction...”  
Trouble is, Doris is good at this, she’s had practice in the last decade, much more so than anyone at the Bureau, which definitely says something about Gordon’s management style.   
“Oh is that it? You don’t even put up a show of giving a damn about private property anymore? And what about the way you treat your staff? Let that madman snatch her and disappear in the wilds! Things haven’t changed, you really don’t give a single shit about people, so don’t play dumb with me, your fucking gun goes in the flowerpot like anybody else. And what about Harry, eh? What about him? Have you any idea, any idea at all...”  
“I’m not,” Albert ends up shouting, only to interrupt himself, as if suddenly uncertain, “I’m not...”  
The pause drags, as his eyes scan the room from left to right with a sense of panic He looks like he might be having an attack, and she’s surprised to hear the sound of her own voice.  
“Doris.”  
She spoke calmly, from the spot where she sits cross-legged, where the carpet used to be. They both turn to look at her, and after a moment Doris steps aside with a sigh.   
“I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Albert hesitantly stumbles to the nearest armchair like a drunk man. It’s a small pile of Albert, she reflects, watching him droop in place, something of a minced man.   
She lets silence fall between them until it begins to suffocate her.   
“It’s good to see your face.”   
He almost snorts.  
“Is it?”  
Feeling it’s probably best not to answer, she only smiles at him, trying to convey how much she remembers, and maybe how much she’s willing to forget. Not all of it. She expects a trivia quiz, anything to identify her, but he seems at a loss, focusing on his hands like he’s surprised to find them there. She raises an eyebrow at him:  
“You look sick.”  
“And you look...”   
He gestures at her hair, her improbable clothes, her posture and seems to give up on finding an appropriate comment, something the old Albert never did.   
“I do what I can. In my defense, I never thought I would see you again.”  
There’s a pause. An anxious one.  
“Otherwise I would have burnt the yoga outfit.”  
Something twitches next to Albert’s eye, but he manages to say:  
“I didn’t expect you would want to see more of me.”  
He looks so vulnerable she doesn’t dare to wonder to what extend they are, indeed, seeing each other again. In any case, Albert is avoiding her gaze.   
“Well I’m here, am I not?”  
A long sigh, like he might deflate and ends up an empty flesh shell on the armchair’s cushions. To be fair, that was a silly question.  
“I read Tammy’s report, I have to tell you.”  
She scoffs.   
“She’s a good one. Maybe the best, you don’t know...”  
“Oh don’t lecture me, not you. I felt like a test paper there, I don’t care if she’s rocking the service the way it needed to be for the last thirty years. She wasn’t there back then, she can’t understand.”  
The annoyed gesture she does with her fingers comes from pure muscle memory, she realizes. It’s good to have it back.   
“Do you think it’s me, then?”  
“I would have sworn you weren’t born when you say you were,” she says, shaking his head softly. “But apparently HR don’t agree with that, and as you know those files are sacred material, so… All those absurd birthday parties. I suppose this is on me.”  
She wants to say it is on him about as much as it is in a way like her to lie about her birth date to make Christmas all about her. But he did shoot the gun.   
“You came here before, didn’t you? I mean you came back here before, when Dale… You and Harry Truman. No one told me anything then. I suppose I did a good job of fading into the background. And those last few days I could only think, you know, how some of us Blue Rose members have always been more literal than others.”  
There’s a hint of hurt in Albert’s eyes, but soon enough he’s back to staring over her shoulder neutrally, and she feels herself growing distressed. What is happening to him?  
“How old are you?” she suddenly asks, trying to make sense of this situation and of her sudden urge to cry.   
When he only gives her an uneasy expression, she takes a deep breath:  
“I’m sorry, but it’s just so strange to me, you have to understand...”  
Taking her gray lock between her fingers, she proudly tilts her head for him to see.   
“Look at that. How is this for a birthday? It’s like I’m finally catching up. My mother used to have those, I think.”  
She watches his expression changes slowly, as if he’s forcing himself to be there, and there’s a sense of wonder in his eyes as he examines her, like he’s struggling to count the years too.   
“When was your hair orange?”  
“Who can tell? When it needed to be, the metaphorical 70s I suppose, although I was much too young, wasn’t I? Remember the years when everyone was there? The balance of it all. And then we all began to listen to Coop.”  
And in a blink, he’s gone again. It’s that name, and it’s fucking unfair after all this time and every bullet in the FBI’s cartridges, after losing every friend she ever had without anyone noticing she was gone, so infuriating to see what it does to Albert, when he can’t even bear to talk to her.  
“I’m sorry I’m not him.”  
The hurt in her voice is enough to makes Albert shakes his head in horror. He even goes to touch her, before catching himself and retreating even further away in his chair, looking trapped. She didn’t expect an easy conversation, but she had the audacity to expect one. This feels like throwing acid at the clouds.   
“No. No.”  
Still, he doesn’t look at her.   
“He’s far gone, Albert. He’s far, far gone. Believe me, I saw.”  
And she’s thankful to whoever that she was always quicker than Cooper was, more reasonable, but she also hates him for it. He still has parts of her that she wants back. Or maybe that too is lost for good. Maybe she’s done with listening to someone’s else life, pushing on her earplugs to ignore the noise of the world around her. 

She remembers one last Diane, one she never really got to meet on her way back. Her hair was pink, but it was about the only thing she could see in the distance, because her face was entirely obscured by the shoulder of one Dale Cooper. From where she stood, it was impossible to tell if he was hugging her or just holding her back. Still she had yelled at him to let her go, to fuck off, insults that mainly convey how tired she was to feel sorry for him. But neither moved or raised their faces. They continued to stand there, immobile, silent. Her arms were around him too, both trapped in a slow dance, equally sad and loving. They ignored all of her shouts. Eventually, she had walked away.  
Maybe Albert hasn’t. And as much as she wants to try and tell him he might still be dancing somewhere, clutching his own Cooper, melting into him, she knows it to be a solitary journey.   
“Look,” he says at last, voice faint. “I’m… I really… God, Diane, I don’t know how to do this.”  
He hides his face in his hands, unable to continue.   
“Well you know how this goes, you put a bullet through a girl’s neck and suddenly she can’t get enough of you.”  
It’s the worse thing to say, because what they used to tell each other, the distant barbs, the irony, suddenly feels like an iron slap, burning anger that refuses to tell its name. Something fractures in Albert. He begins shaking, one hand contorting violently as he grasps the chair, trying to get up and failing.   
She’s on her feet in a blink, ignoring the nausea, and grabs his arm to force him to look at her. 

“Albert? Fuck. Are you… Easy. Look at me. How do you feel? Albert? How do you feel?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been so long I can't even remember for sure, but one of the thing that got me started on this fic was the suggestion of a shouting match between Albert and Doris, I think. Then I asked myself "but what could they be shouting about", and here we are.


	7. 1. Salt (Sunday, October 2nd)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A disappearance.

**ALBERT**

He’s not really where he’s supposed to be. He would tell, if he could, that he forgot himself like you forget something in a subway train, a bag or a case that is locked tight, letting yourself be distracted by the traffic and the strange lights and the time, for it is so, so late. But the words he misses were left in the bag too, zipped in, and he needs someone to tell them for him, someone to whom the words can apply without question so that they’ll be allowed to look for the traces and rummage through the lost and found.

Eventually, it’s something Diane says. Or something she asks.

He’s pretty sure it’s about Diane anyway.

In the background, somewhere, there is her voice, impossibly clear from the bullet he put through it. She always hated Mondays.

He’s not quite sure, now, about any of the dates. It’s too late for him. Every day is a Sunday on which he gets left behind.

If he tries to reconstruct the past week, all he gets is a sort of slide-show, the ones they used to do back in Philly, way before anything remotely intelligent was invented, with terrible sepia photos of shabby buildings and decomposed bodies. Diane got the hang of those projectors better than anyone else, shooing everyone away and telling them to make themselves useful for once and to bring coffee for she certainly couldn’t do _everything_. Cooper always seemed to break them.

Diane and Cooper.

They are standing in the sheriff's office. All of them, at the station. He’s never felt so crowded in his life.

He remembers Cooper’s face with the anonymity of an ID picture. The colors are in the right place but seem off regardless, as if a weekend painter had just added them with a trowel, then taken a step back and declared to the baffled audience: “And here’s how you find your inner clown!”

He remembers Cooper’s frozen face, and then the conspicuous image of a blond woman dressed in the fashion equivalent of cotton candy. There are three of them, walking around as if on a catwalk, and something in that outfit screams at him, but his ears are clouded. The woman is addressing him, bending carefully from the precarious heights of her heels in an act of compassionate benevolence. Cooper is gone.

“How are you feeling,” she asks, her tone too joyful. “You must have had quite a fright.”

When he fails to respond, she puts a tuna sandwich in his hand and smiles sweetly.

“Fish is recommended for dealing with strong emotions. There’s something in salty water that just helps keeping everything is place, nourishes the flow. We believe in a balanced diet. And of course, it’s wonderful for your memory.”

He doesn’t remember eating the sandwich.

The next face of this terrible slide-show is the annoying deputy. His mouth keeps moving, and he struggles to catch on.

“...can you believe how well Lucy did? I’m not surprised. She always wins all our Clue’s games. But see, now we need to know where they went. I called Wally about this, and he was already heading toward here – he said something about the wind turning east. So, when are they coming back? Especially, I was wondering about that woman, because I’ve been thinking about the way she...”

The face frowns, and Albert gets a spark of recognition as the policeman fails to find his words. Instead he resorts to make small, broken gestures with his hand, touching his own arm lightly in several places before pursing his lips in the semblance of a kiss and adding:

“And she seemed nice.”

He loses focus for a bit after that. When he comes to again, the deputy is saying, looking at him earnestly:

“And Agent Rosenfield. Sheriff Truman – not that one, the other one – will be so glad to know you’re in town.”

It’s the last thing he remembers hearing. The next slide he gets is one of Gordon’s face, and he can’t help but be disappointed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A fish, in *your* percolator? It's more likely than you think.


	8. 2. Closet (undisclosed)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albert is shutting himself down. Tammy and Constance tries to reach out.

The night after Cooper and Diane’s disappearance, he has a dream.

It’s late and he’s in the darkest, smallest closet there is in all Santa Monica. It’s been a long time since he last visited. He thought he was out of there for good when he left at 18, that there was no way he was ever going back, but this goes to show he always gets everything wrong just like his mother used to say (V _ergüenza._ )

Better here than outside. At least it’s safe, even if he can’t shake the fear that sooner or later someone will open the door and find him there. It’s a closet made for a child, so narrow you can only stand and not sit, and what will people say? ( _Shibboleth_.)

He just goes on waiting, breathing so hard it will inevitably give him away, paralyzed by the fear of upcoming ridicule.

A creaking sound. A rush of air, and the face of the pink lady is in front of him again, with the same smile stuck on it, as she says cheerfully:

“There you are! I looked everywhere for you. I’ve got you a cup of coffee, to go with your sandwich. It’s extra salty. But don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

She winks at him, and leaves the door ajar as she walks away.

Obviously he has to decide what to do about it, because now there’s a ray of light entering the closet, capturing each grain of dust in the midst of its fall.

Before he can make up his mind, though, someone in his back asks:

“Aren’t you going to drink that?”

The accent is foreign, a woman’s voice he knows from the movie theater, something he saw years and years ago: sunny landscapes and a laughable love story. His mouth is too dry for speech, but he’s certainly not going to turn around.

He doesn’t remember drinking the coffee.

But he remembers waking up the most thirsty he’s ever been in his life.

After the station’s slide-show, he finds himself sitting next to Tammy in a car. That particular face grounds him for a moment, long enough to hear her declare with a sense of finality:

“I’ve found us a bed and breakfast.”

The place is the stuff of nightmares, all lace and fat, presumptuous cats: it’s a terrible setting to wake up to in the middle of the night. The feeling of estrangement reminds him of the time he used to wake up in Harry’s cabin, thinking what he felt under his cheek was, or should have been, the hard, cold surface of his working desk, and not Harry’s chest. It seems to be the only thing he’s able to remember precisely, the sound of Harry’s beating heart. Or maybe it’s just his own, loud in his ears and speeding up.

The day after the dream is a Monday. He sleeps through most of it. He dreams again.

At breakfast he chooses to ignore the concern in Tammy’s eyes and focuses instead on the Persian cat who keeps trying to climb on her shoulder. She pretends to be appalled but the way she wiggles left and right to evade the needy paws makes her secret delight apparent even to him.

“I still can’t believe we’re here.”

There’s a careful sense of wonder in her words, as she waits for a reaction that doesn’t come.

“It’s like walking straight into the matrix.”

Maybe he’s just too old now, he thinks as he watches her discreetly trying to snatch a picture of the cat as it sniffs her scones. He never thought much about age. The last twenty years have felt like living in the boarding era of an airport, and some of them have literally been just that. For the most part he stood there, frowning at the glass panels and counting the white folds in the sky, as the jet lag accumulated.

Somewhere in the background, Tammy is still talking about the importance of the town in the task force’s history, and the various hypotheses surrounding its centrality, coordinates and geographic trivia. Apparently Gordon sent her more notes, files he probably never heard of.

Once she’s gone on what clearly sounds to her like an adventure, he’s left with his lack of instructions for the day. What he knows is this: the trees can rustle melodramatically, the waterfalls can flow all the way through every postcard, he won’t set a foot outside of the hotel. He doesn’t want to walk the streets of Twin Peaks, refuses to see the sights and to eat that pie again.

Instead, he calls Constance. Or rather something calls her for him; the phone is against his ear before he can understand what he’s doing.

“Talbot. This better be good, I’m in the middle of a corpse, right between course and dessert, and that check is gonna hurt someone, possibly me.”

It suddenly strikes him that it’s been years – but how many – since his last autopsy. That was one of the things Constance awakened in him: the laughable idea that he used to be a doctor. She had asked him about forensics techniques like it actually mattered, recalled anecdotes about successfully identifying a corpse from a last meal or childhood fractures, could tell him of the times she, the local entertainer, had effectively saved the day.

All of it had felt real, and yet he couldn’t quite grasp what she was describing then, sitting at that restaurant’s table in Buckhorn, only managed to smile at her like she was too good to be true.

He must have been silent for too long, for he hears her say pointedly:

“I recognize the number, you know, so there’s no need for you to go all Michael Myers on me – I’ll never watch those movies again, let me tell you. How is it going, up in the high spheres?”

“Sorry, I... Reception’s terrible. Another corpse, you say?”

He knows instinctively she really is at work and not dining somewhere fancy, because a part of him understands Constance’s language and logic faultlessly, and from what she told him that is a rare occurrence.

“Yup. I’ve done more needle work in the last few weeks than in the rest of my career. I mean usually 90% of my job is to document the bruises of happily married women, and most of the time they’re alive. But then you show up and suddenly it’s literally raining men. Bodies. Well, that one’s a gal and at least she’s got great hair. And a head.”

For a second, a white spot obscures his sight, cutting a neat hole in the awful embroidered painting he’s been staring at while listening. The sound of his heartbeat swallows up Constance’s voice. He never could quite understand how Diane managed her haircuts. A hard blink later, the spot is gone.

“It’s Hastings’ wife, Phyllis. My boss got on to your boss about that, didn’t he tell you? I was hoping that was what you were calling about actually, we’re a bit in over our heads here, so to speak.”

As she explains about the phenomenal drama this is causing in the local high-school, he tries to fight the sense of relief he’s inexplicably feeling.

“And last but not least, their lawyer disappeared. I have to say, it’s certainly nice to see a bit of action, but I… Dave uncovered some pretty disturbing texts between those two, and then they found something about another teacher that is frankly alarming for the children, and I can’t help but wonder “where does this stop”, you know what I mean?”

With that simple phrase, nausea slowly begins to replace relief. They abandoned Buckhorn without a thought, too busy chasing a ghost, and Constance, who achieved the feat of making him momentarily forget that he’s been waiting for something to happen for the last twenty years, was left to deal with the reality of her hometown and the crumbling of everyday life. He can’t even pretend he’s surprised misery is spreading like a gas leak. He knew it and he didn’t do a damned thing.

“Where are you right now?”

“Washington State.”

There’s an excited sound at the other end of the line.

“Isn’t that where Briggs disappeared? Have you found Dougie Jones?”

At first he doesn’t understand her question, the name all but forgotten. And then he’s reminded of how little Constance knows, and how people tend to expect positive issues out of investigations: results, hypotheses tested and confirmed. What they don’t expect is federal agents to go and shoot their deputy like their fingers knew what a trigger was.

“I… no, listen, I don’t really know why I’m calling, I suppose I only wanted to check how you were doing. It’s been… a weird time.”

“Tell me about it.”

It isn’t entirely clear if this is meant to be a hearty agreement or an offer, probably more generous than she realizes. When he says nothing, she continues:

“Dave’s been rather on edge since that whole “exploding head” business. It was his car, you know. I’m not saying you broke my good egg, but… Everyone’s pretty nervous. To be honest, I wish you would come back.”

Not a joke, he can only assume, but still it baffles him that anyone would want _him_ back, especially since he seems to make things worse everywhere he goes.

“Right now I could do with another coroner. I still have to show you how good I am at burning lasagnas, and there’s that club we talked about… Buckhorn, the City of Light, and all that. I don’t know, I’m not making much sense, but that corpse is staring at me and you’re letting me babble so it’s on you. It’s like every time I made a pal at summer camp and they inevitably lived on the other side of the country. This case is far from being closed, anyway.”

He knows he’s being hurtful by remaining silent at that point, but he has no choice. Diane had a room in the very hotel they dined at. He’s not much of a friend, not much of person at all. So he only says:

“Could you let me know if you come across any new female body?”

He can tell Constance is mildly upset by his segue, but she recovers quickly, going back to professional mode in an instant:

“At the rate this is going, close your eyes and count to ten. Anything in particular we should be looking for? Personally, I have a preference for the less-weird, but only because I’m an old-fashioned gal, and my colleagues are convinced I’m finally losing it, with the way my reports have turned lately… Hold on, what the hell is this? I’m sorry, hands in a corpse and all that, I really need to go. But do visit on your way back if you can, I mean if you want to, that would be appreciated.”

The line goes dead, and he’s left with an empty room and an unpacked suitcase.

Later that night he gets a text that says “ _Ignore the_ _clingy_ _ME. I’m mortally (!) embarrassed_ ”. He doesn’t answer it.

If days pass him by, he cannot really tell. It’s Tammy who’s been counting for him, gliding memos under his door. There’s a voice in his head telling him prostration is a very leisurely activity.

Sometimes she drags him down the stairs and lets him pretend he hasn’t just woken up, while telling him animatedly about her advances.

“I’ve been asking around, like Gordon asked. I have to say I’m intrigued. People are friendly enough, but I got all the trouble in the world making them speak about the case. They only seem to want to talk about that woman who died on October 1st.”

In that moment, somewhere on the right side of Tammy’s head, the white spot he experienced while talking to Constance reappears. He forces himself to be still.

“She’s called Lanterman – I think she was in the files. I didn’t notice it at first, because most of them don’t seem to have known her so well, but it’s in the air. Every single person I’ve talked to mentioned it at some point. The whole town seems to be in half-mourning, but I would say they’re not fully aware of it. Here’s my notes, if you want to have a look.”

Her expression is so hopeful he makes a show of scanning her neat handwriting for a few minutes, stopping at a margin where he only catches part of a sentence, ‘ _it’s just something in the corner of your eye_ ’ followed by several purple question marks.

“Rings any bell?” she asks eventually.

“Can’t say it does. It’s been… quite some time.”

“I think Briggs and her knew each other. I’m going to have to go through the archives.”

He only nods and makes to go back upstairs. He hopes she imagines Gordon left him some secret task that can only be accomplished by never leaving the square feet of his room and keeping his window shut. No comment has been made so far, but she’s the opposite of stupid. Maybe that’s why she’s acting mostly like they’re having an impromptu holiday in Vermont, and keeps looking at him expectantly.

Before he goes back to bed, he checks his phone. Constance’s message is still there, begging. No call from Gordon.

The next day, he’s woken up at 6 a.m. by a sense of dread, and texts Tammy he’s going out. Then he buries himself under the covers and wait.

At one point during the afternoon, he finds himself standing in front of the bathroom’s sink. Water is dripping from his face and his hands are wet; more importantly, he can see in the mirror someone watching him from across the room. It’s a rare and terrifying moment of consciousness, the immovable weight of his own body being discharged on him in one go as he tries to turn around, panicked, unable to understand what he’s doing there. His hands are numb, dead, and he falls back like a puppet without strings, missing the sink’s edge in one large, comical gesture. From the floor’s cold tiles, he can only see a blank silhouette looming over him. More water suddenly cascades on his face, over his gaping mouth: it flows and flows relentlessly, until he eventually runs out of air.

In the morning he finds he’s back in his bed with four missed calls and a text from Tammy, which serves to remind him of his name.

As it turns out, Tammy doesn’t take well to being avoided, and she eventually manages to corner him. If he could still read faces he would see how agitated she is; but now, for her sake, the most he can achieve is to watch her fiddle with the Chinese take-away they sneaked in her room and put on random expressions to pretend he’s more than a bad drawing on the wall.

“There’s something different about the Palmer case,” she blurts out a few seconds after opening her box, which means those noodles will mostly serve as a prop in her methodical examination of what’s bothering her.

“Either the locals are losing it, or the archives are faulty.”

He looks up at her, barely understanding what she’s saying, and in that moment, despite all the things he cannot feel, he understands he’s done with it. With the job. The Bureau. Everything. Gordon.

He doesn’t care about the archives. Doesn’t know what they are even about. Every day is a Sunday, and he can’t ever go back to work.

“Some elements simply don’t fit. I’m beginning to wonder if what happened last week could have made an impact.”

From a third party’s point of view, it seems like the air in the room just charged with new particles, spelling something unreadable. There’s a strange buzzing in his ears.

“Have you observed anything similar before? I mean we know forged memories are not uncommon, but we’re potentially talking about a whole town here. And I couldn’t reach the previous sheriff, who’s sick apparently, but I’m definitely going to see those deputies again.”

Harry’s chest under his cheek, the beating of a heart, speeding up, the tiles of the floor cold on his skin, the beating of a heart, Cooper’s hand on his shoulder, Diane’s haircut, the beating of a heart, Diane’s face… He’s got to get out of here, or he’s going to faint.

“Of course collective denial isn’t something to discard entirely, but I was there on Sunday too, and the day before that, so I suppose… wilder hypotheses suggest themselves. At least that’s what Gordon seems to think.”

And in the emptiness of the room he’s surprised to suddenly hear his own voice.

“He was there with them.”

Of all that was left unsaid during this week, he didn’t expect the first real sentence he utters to be this, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Gordon was there, disappearing in the dark with Cooper and Diane, perhaps even showing the way. People came and went, sucked in by the void, but Gordon kept walking on the edge, turning back, and he was always, always there.

Tammy’s expression stays carefully neutral, her eyes not leaving him as she says:

“So it seemed, yes. And of course he won’t tell but I know he spoke to them. Confidentiality rules I can understand, but this…”

Quickly, she gives a nervous look to the room, stopping only at his sorry form to decide after a second there’s not a single chance he’s going to tell on her.

“...It’s just bad protocol,” she whispers, the enormity of the accusation equaling the indignation in her voice. “Now we don’t even know if we were there to bring them back or to send them on some mission – that I personally never heard of. If there’s a cover story I… I mean we tracked him or whoever we believed him to be, we… disposed of her double, only to discover in the end we were only trying to send them further away? Without questions? I don’t feel comfortable with this, Albert. Whatever the reason you hired me, I want to actually try and understand what we’re dealing with.”

Her furious assertion should make him proud, but he’s too shocked by what has just been formulated, the underlying idea that has been plaguing him, screaming at him from a dark corner of his mind. _Trying to send them further away_. He looked for Cooper for so long, so many years and then… Is this what this has been all about? What Blue Rose is? The mounting horror in his guts at least serves to bring him back to the present situation for a moment and he tells her, getting on his feet:

“I know.”

He wants to tell that’s the precise reason he wanted to hire her, though why Gordon was so on board with it remains to this day a mystery. Maybe the old fool understands deep down he has to be both the poison and the remedy to his own faults. Instead he only says:

“You’re a good agent, Preston. Probably the only one.”

He’s out of the room before he can ask himself what he’s trying to accomplish. Discharging his last personal thoughts on someone who can still carry them, perhaps, so that he can finally forget about it all and let go.

On Monday though, there is a call from the station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to remind the general public that this was painful for me too.


	9. 3. Curtain call (___)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diane is back. Albert most certainly isn't.

Eventually, it’s about Diane.

Everyday is a Sunday on which he kills his best friend.

Gordon doesn’t even ask to speak to him: Tammy is left with the complex task of delivering the news, looking at him like he may dissolve, which he just might, since it’s after all the done thing in those parts.

For a single second, hard and burning when air hits his lungs, he believes it’s going to be Cooper. The hope is brief, but impossible to forget. And even more impossible is forgetting what sort of person that second makes him.

But it’s not Cooper. Perhaps for the best, it never is.

In the aftershock, he does exactly two things. The first is texting Constance something that would hopefully convince her not to hate him, although his pathetic quip about his un-dead friend certainly won’t make sense to her in the immediate future.

The second is to call Gordon, who without a doubt knows what is up because he doesn’t answer. In a sense it’s a relief, the sound of his answering machine even more familiar than his actual voice, shrouded in loss and deceit.

For the first time he notices the prerecorded message is certainly the dumbest, saddest thing he’s ever heard, with its obsolete jokes about Reagan and pitiful asides at “the ladies”. On the second listening it’s become a beautiful summary of all those lost years, and on the third it rises to the sublime, Gordon’s shouted words turning into a chant of sorts. After the signal, he leaves the longest message the voicemail would take.

Once he’s all out of words, he climbs back to his room and naps.

The next day, he asks Tammy where Diane is.

“We put her at the Trumans’,” she looks at him with alarm. “You even said it was a good idea.”

Why he would ever say such a thing eludes him: he can’t have championed leaving her with _Doris_ , of all people. He’s almost sure there was a point in his past when he had to endure way too many questions about aliens and the FBI – it must have been real because even he’s not that good at devising tortures for himself.

“I’ll go see her in a few days, but I want to set the record straight before I do. And call Director Bryson.”

There is a sense of decisiveness in her tone that completely fades away when she shoots him another look and adds, softly:

“You should rest.”

There is little doubt that this phone call to Denise is going to involve him at some point, and she makes sure her expression is eloquent enough on the matter.

“I just quit.”

One of the main reasons he trusts Tammy is that her reactions are always so much like her it’s hard to doubt who you’re talking to. In her eyes he reads pain but also immediate terror over the possibility he would ask her to do the same, out of loyalty or whatever they call office politics these days. Preston may not be the best interlocutor to unleash your troubles upon, but in moments like those he can’t help but feel a fondness for her so strong it helps him concentrate.

“Are you sure,” she asks with the face of someone who already knows the answer but still refuses to believe it. Some part of his mind knows that Tammy fought tooth and nails for her job, got to convince an army of Gordon clones that she was a safe bet, was told countless times to be “a good sport” and that she was no fun.

“This may be a rushed decision, you…”

She hesitates, but there was always an uncompromising bond between Tammy and the truth. Again, he’s reminded: best hire they ever made.

“You haven’t been exactly yourself, since this all started. Not according to my observations.”

It’s protocol, he knows the words, he should. It doesn’t mean he can actually understand what she’s saying.

Keeping his head low, he shakes one demented cat off his leg.

“Luckily, I’m not working for the Bureau anymore, or only on a technicality, so this shouldn’t be a concern.”

His voice is detached, hollow. Still, even to his own ears his determination is palpable.

“Albert, we need to talk about this.”

“Go see her. I’ll read your report. And then, I’ll go myself.”

In the meantime, he vaguely thinks, it would be good to determine why the idea of the Trumans’ house bothers him so much, and if he ever went there.

For the next couple of days, he mostly forgets about himself, waiting for Tammy’s impressions. The only thing that ties him to this place, to this moment of existence, is the tiring sound of a bird tapping on his window. It’s always there, and always the same bird as far as he can tell, continuously and almost joyfully knocking, keeping him on edge until he finally can’t take it anymore. Nerves raw, he slowly walks to the room’s wardrobe, pushes aside the heavy curtain, and steps inside the dark compartment. One hand pressed on his left ear, he turns around, and closes it back after him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a reason I keep locking Albert in closets, I suppose.


	10. 4. Stangers (Friday__)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albert's visit, after his dizzy spell. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't get better.

“I’m fine. It’s fine.”

Doris’s ugly wallpaper is staring back at him vengefully as he blurts out words in answer to something Diane just asked him and he can’t recall. Coming here was a mistake. He feels like he might throw up.

“God, you certainly don’t look fine. You scared the hell out of me just now. For how long has this been happening? Doris will never forgive me if you die in her armchair.”

It’s a funny thing to say, isn’t it? It is all hilarious, he’s sure. And now she’s here, her fingers on his wrist, and he can’t… can’t make himself be there for her. Has he even got a right to, when she’s so fully herself and he’s just a waste of air?

Her hand is warm and she smells like people who live on borrowed soap, clean linen, and not much else. He’s almost sure she used to wear perfume, but when and which Diane… Suddenly he wonders if he smells like anything.

“We could both use a drink, right?” she offers, voice heavy with emotion, and he knows she’s trying to reassure the both of them. “And then some. Even I know we’re too old for bars, still I would drink with you, do you hear me? I don’t know what you expected, but for me it’s been twenty years sitting at that counter. You’re probably the person I saw the most, towards the end. I never told you that, did I?”

He’s always liked her face, how unforgiving and sharp she looked, and as the crow’s feet on the corner of her eyes deepen with her smile, it occurs to him that he can’t cope with this. It’s a fact, hard as a wall, and even though there are 99 bottles hanging on her side of it, he’s beginning to think he’s the one who’s wasted. As far as hauntings go, this one is spectacular.

The longer he stays silent, the more uncertain the light in her eyes gets: it’s clear enough that she’s beginning to wonder if he remembers her at all.

“If you don’t say something soon I’ll call Preston and have her question _you_.”

And maybe they should question him after all, though he can’t even say he’d be able to give them the year. He wishes she would tell him he doesn’t get to do this, not to her and not after everything that happened. That he has to let her be mad at him. And that anyone would finally point out what an utter piece of shit he is. But Doris is still hidden in the kitchen, so he forces the mask on his face again, drops his eyes at her sleeves and comments, in a passable impression of himself:

“I swear, what’s with the sweaters here?”

It’s a navy thing with an autumn leaves pattern, probably straight from Doris’s closet of hell, as if he ever wanted to be reminded what a Pandora box that wardrobe could be. Harry, of course, never saw what the problem was.

She shrugs, her fingers caressing the fabric affectionately.

“Local camisoles. What happened to my suitcase anyway? It’s been days, and you know how it gets with vintage, so mark my words, if you let Gordon burn it you’re a dead man.”

It’s a funny thing, really. It’s a funny, funny thing.

He had stood in her hotel room after the shooting, facing the huge monogrammed case, long and dark as a coffin. Gordon was adamant they should go through it but refused to do it himself, invoking a virtual moral code, hierarchies. Something in him revolted at the idea the task might fall to Tammy, that she might touch her clothes, find the hidden vodka flasks.

Somehow the worse part had been how incriminating the dozens of nail-polish bottles had looked, as he lined them on the bathtub’s edge, how excruciatingly real.

The suitcase was in the car’s trunk, they brought it to Twin Peaks with everyone’s luggage as if she was still following them. He had made himself forget about it until now. A suitcase full of Diane. Her whole exterior locked up in a box.

He had asked, eventually, what they had done. Of course, Gordon was talking of self-defense, of the double’s obvious murderous intentions but no. This was Diane. They both knew it. And every agent with a gun would eventually want to shoot Gordon, given enough time. Gordon hadn’t contradicted him.

Why is he here? There is no way he can be sitting with her now. He isn’t sitting with her now. Something was terribly wrong.

His breath catches in his throat, and the light seems to grow stronger, the room slowly turning whiter. There’s an atmosphere of concern around him, that he inhales more than he feels, maybe a hand on his shoulder, but as the ceiling melts into nothingness he realizes he’s past that, past everything. Present time is nothing more than a cardboard clock on the wall.

And then he remembers. He’s not where he’s supposed to be.

Every day is a Sunday.


	11. 5. Friends (Sunday, October 2nd)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albert forgot himself at the Sheriff's Station. Somewhere in the trunk of a car. Every day is a Sunday, until it isn't.

Everything is dark, but he knows he’s at the Sheriff’s Station. He’s always at the Sheriff’s Station. It doesn’t make sense, why he insists on staying – Harry stopped working here a long time ago. In fact it’s a wonder he can even tell, since he can’t see a thing in here, but when there’s only one thought left ingrained in your brain, you’d better not challenge it.

As time goes by, though, and he remains still inside the confined space that’s been assigned to him, it begins to dawn on him that this is the beginning of a story about something misplaced. The case. Diane’s suitcase. It’s in the trunk of his car, right where he parked it in front of the building, untouched. Knowing this, he suddenly feels at peace. He knows where he is after all.

It smells like vodka in here, which is always better than nothingness. He can stand, surprisingly, the lid as big as a door, and locked – not that it matters, because he’s not going anywhere. A safe place to continue on waiting.

But after a moment, he hears a soft knock.

A grating noise, and the face of a woman appears: she’s wearing the same pink dress he dreamed about, but her hair is cut in a bob. It’s also darker, sand blond maybe, not that he knows anything about colors. She leans forward amiably, in a halo of light.

“At last! I looked for you again, why are you so late?”

Gently, she takes him by the hand and pulls him outside. Her fingers presses his shoulder briefly but in a way that presses something inside him too.

Blinded by the light, he takes a few hesitant steps, and when he finally begins to regain his sight, she’s gone. Still, a friendly face.

He looks around and recognizes the sheriff’s office, all woods and preposterous carpeting.

In front of him stands his reflection. A second Albert.

Well.

That’s one name for it.

The copy would be almost perfect, he supposes, except for the flash of recognition that he imagines can be read in his own eyes now, for the eyes that face him are blank, uninterested. He would raise an arm, like in those slapstick comedies Gordon enjoys so much, to see if he can break the illusion, but it suddenly occurs to him neither of them needs such unjustified cruelty. So he stays in sync with the other Albert, watching him and wondering when he has become so polished, so boring. Utterly defeated.

It’s a rare privilege, he supposes, to get to see yourself, to really see yourself like this, no filter, no pat on the back from a friend who thinks you aren’t as bad as it seems.

Looking at this slow-motion car crash of a human being, he can hear Harry’s voice, like it was twenty years ago, before chemo, Harry putting his hand on his and telling him that maybe it was just the two of them now. The two of them even without the ghost of Cooper leaning over their shoulders, a friendly hand on their backs, gently pushing them toward one another. The two of them. Ha.

While he looks at himself, he wonders if there’s even two people here. Perhaps only this: a line, five, across a tired forehead. A weakening chin. Hairline, receding so far it’s barely there. One eye, shifty. One eye, gone. The saddest ears in the whole State. That is not a person, or twelve. That is just a collection of failures huddling together for warmth in a futile attempt to spit at entropy in the face.

He needs to call Constance when this is done, to see if he still has the words in him to make a joke that’s not entirely tailored for an audience of one FBI director. But right now, it just came back to him that he needs to do what Diane would do. So he hunches his shoulders, slipping his body in the role if only to escape his own ridicule, extends his arms as if they were ever so long, long enough to reach that empty shell of himself he tried to abandon like an old sloughed skin the owls would try to eat before they realize the snake has gone off. And with his longer arms, his neck sheltered into his shoulders, he pulls the oldest, most tired Blue Rose agent in his embrace, and keeps him there. He doesn’t let go.

Somewhere in the tiny space left between the two bodies, it begins to look like this Sunday may eventually end.

A moment later he’s blinking at the station’s defective neon light, and Lucy Brennan is staring at him like she’s delighted to find only one version of him in the sheriff’s office.

“There you are, agent Rosenfield! That friend of yours has been looking for you everywhere.”

Touching his cheek and finding a light stubble there, he eventually asks, just in case:

“...where are all the others?”

Lucy blinks.

“Well, Sheriff Truman’s gone home because he was concerned about Doris – it’s pretty late, you know. Hawk went to check something in Margaret Lanterman’s cabin, he said, James and Freddie went to the RR I think, and Bobby got an urgent call from Shelly and he needed to get home, that is to her home, because he lives on Mapple Street now. Maggie got a phone call too, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Chad is still in his cell, those nice ladies were headed back to Las Vegas, but I think they stopped at the Bang Bang Bar for a dance, they said they wanted to dance now. Director Cole called a plane to go back Washington, because he couldn’t stay for too long, and Andy is waiting for me in his office. I just wonder about your friend, she might still be in there somewhere, she was worried about you. She is so tall. And of course Agent Cooper left with that woman some time ago, but you know about that already. Andy thought it quite romantic at first, but I wasn’t so sure, and we’ve had a small fight – I don’t know, that woman we found, she was so scared. And then there was that other woman in her place, and people told me she was Diane, but I’m not sure about that. I’ve spoken to Diane once, and she was nothing like that.”

“You have? But when?”

“Once. It was on the phone. But she was nothing like that.”

He takes a moment to think about the red-haired woman who had kissed Cooper straight on the lips before saying anything, who hadn’t looked at anyone else. Maybe. Maybe not. Cooper hadn’t looked around either. But, and it was so important he had almost missed it, Diane wasn’t anything like Cooper.

“...and I was telling him: sometimes when you’re very scared, a familiar face can make you very happy. You’re in such a hurry to forget about the fear you can do things you don’t really mean – and it happens so quickly you can’t know if you really want them. It’s like snakes.”

He knows he shouldn’t ask, but he hasn’t felt so sharp since God knows when, so it’s a celebratory question of sorts.

“Snakes?”

“I’m deadly afraid of them, Agent Rosenfield. Snakes are terrifying. And I was telling Andy, after I see a snake I could kiss any lizard. Even those who bite.”

This time he manages to stop himself before he wins a ticket for a biology lesson on biting lizards. He hadn’t been around the secretary that much, but he remembered that Lucy was surprisingly knowledgeable on some topics.

“So, I don’t think it was so romantic at all. Anyway, you should call her, your friend. She said she would wait for you to come around. Are you hungry? There are donuts left in the break room, and you’ve been here a while.”

He hardly believes what he’s about to ask this time, and once again regrets Constance’s absence, for she would have had a field day with it.

“You wouldn’t happen to have anything salty around?”

He will call Tammy eventually – he wonders how she knew she had to wait for him. He can almost hear the phantom sound of her heels behind him, but she can wait for one more minute. Wait for him in the car before she finds them that ridiculous B&B that’s more “human” and less “impersonal” than a standard hotel room, because that is what she’s like, and thank God for her even if he has to spend the night chocking on mothballs.

By Monday, Diane will be back. He will see her again. In a week, she will attend a funeral, and she won’t go alone. But right now he needs to do something for himself, that he should have done long ago.

While the phone rings, he holds his breath. The echo of this tone will resonate in the other Albert’s sad ears for years, before it comes to this, to the other person breathing at the end of the line.

“Harry? Yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have my solution, people: Albert needs to give himself a hug (everyday, once a day, never planning it).  
> So, that was our minimal time loop. I'll let you deal with it.  
> Side note: Lucy is the best, and she knows everything. I don't know where that snakes thing came from, but it's now my favourite thing in the world.


	12. 6. Company (__Friday, again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albert's visit, take three. In which it gets better, and everything is always about Laura Palmer.

“How do you feel? Albert?”

Telling her it’s good to be back would be the pinnacle of cruelty, so he swallows back an urge to answer it’s really him or at least an acceptable substitute.

God, he really likes her face. Here is something he probably never told her, but now is not the time to be ludicrous. And she’s doing that thing with her hand, the decades-old gesture he’s come to associate with every conversation they ever had – like shooing a bird away, with her shoulders hunched. He lets out a long sigh, and feels his face with his hands, finds himself to be there after all. Ignoring the dry taste in his mouth, he blurts out:

“Like a bag of sand who just resigned.”

To her infinite credit, Diane doesn’t move more than one eyebrow at the news.

“Well, thank god for that. Long time coming, I suppose. And where is Gordon anyway? Keeping himself scrupulously out of the loop again?”

“Washington. Gone to be roasted by Bryson, I expect. I’m sorry, but could you ask Doris for some water? I’m not going into that kitchen, and I don’t think I can stand right now.”

Diane gives him one long look, a look he knows he doesn’t deserve, wary and scorched but too tender for his own sake.

“Fuck, Albert. You can’t ask this of me.”

Nevertheless, cursing him in her every gestures, she gets up, the controlled lotus pose but a memory imprinted on the carpet. She isn’t steady on her feet either, and she’s right, he can’t ask this of her. But two is company, and now that they are indeed two, they can at least sit together if their legs won’t carry them too far.

There are wet, vaguely emotional noises in the kitchen, the sound of plates being angrily piled up against the sound of a negotiation. When Diane comes back with a glass of water in her left hand and a single tear on her right cheek, he decides that’s a mystery for another day.

“Tell me one thing though,” she says as she carefully sits again, clearly thinking hard about where each limb should go. “I don’t care about the rest for now, but you’ve been here long enough, you’ve looked for everyone.”

Except for her, she doesn’t add. He nods as he can, the implication clear to both, and glances at his own distorted image in the water before taking one large gulp.

“Is it about the girl?”

Instantly his eyes are on her again.

“Somehow I remember her name, it was one of the first to come back to me, and even if I’ve worked on that case I’ve never… I mean, it doesn’t make sense. Why do I remember her name?”

Why, just as Dale Cooper seems to be everywhere and everyone, is everything always about Laura Palmer?

A few years ago, he remembers that now, he was laying awake in a shabby motel in the middle of the night, Gordon fast asleep behind the too-thin wall. He had asked himself then, his eyes traveling the many creases of the dark blue sheets, why they never talked about the reason Cooper, but also Chet, but also Phil, and even Lois Duffy who remained forever a stranger, had gone away.

“I don’t know,” he finally admits. “I thought it was about you.”

And of course this will always be what they come back to: upstairs there is a room, not an empty room exactly, with bookcases full of green paperbacks and a wall of perplexed dolphins. Somewhere in the kitchen, Doris is probably on the verge of breaking something, or more likely waiting for the world to break it for her.

A few feet above where she’s standing, in a card-box under the bed, a diary states that nothing will happen to the child who wrote it some twenty five years ago.

In a quiet suburb of Philadelphia, an asthmatic boy is carefully placing his hand on his dead grandmother’s forehead.

And in the smallest closet you can find in Santa Monica, another boy is hiding, praying that no one will ever see through him, while unbeknownst to him, in a nearby town, a girl wishes her hair could be different.

All of this answers to the name “Laura Palmer” and bathes in its echo, but what will come after may be allowed to exist on its own for the two of them, at least for a little while.

Diane beams at him, her smile shining like in the first days, as the tear from the kitchen disappears under her chin.

“You were always the best liar.”

It is said in a benevolent tone, like his best will be enough as long as he’s paying for the next round of drinks, no matter if all she’s having is a weary chamomile. She closes her eyes briefly as one of her hand lifts to adjust the collar of her flannel under her catastrophic sweater, or maybe just feel it.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Probably chase Gordon all the way to Mount Rushmore to make sure he understands I’m not coming back.”

“I would follow, but this is going to end up in a hiking accident. The old lunatic must be scared out of his life that I’m still kicking. Not even a phone call coming my way, I suppose?”

“I… I wouldn’t expect too much on that front, no.”

He doesn’t say that maybe, just maybe – and in his heart of heart he hopes it is somewhat close to the truth, otherwise what would be the point of anything – that Gordon has already lost so much he isn’t really prepared to gain anyone back. Not that it excuses anything. All those years they made the mistake of following someone who was laying a trail of crumbs behind him while marching straight into the dark heart of the woods.

Diane’s hand is trembling slightly, he notes.

“At least he’ll have the sights. The real deal. Do you… do you have plans?”

She scoffs.

“What do you think? That paycheck is going to hurt Denise all the way to Philly: my overtime work is long overdue. To be honest I think I deserve a luxury extraction at the very least, but I’ve been told we live in a debt economy. Otherwise, it’s about what you’d expect: I need a job and a flat and a damned shopping trip far away from the Canadian border.”

Something in her tone tells him that she’s still going to steal that one shirt from poor Frank.

“I don’t expect you know of a secret spot where a gal in trouble could crash for a bit of peace and quiet? I don’t really feel up to anything but I… I have reasonable hopes. A bit of sun and karaoke nights, for starters.”

He rubs his face, letting his mind drifting off for a second, eventually smiles. This must be his inner clown manifesting itself after years of artificial coma, he supposes, but the thought is appealing and he contemplates it for a bit longer like a shard of glass under the light, observing it from every angle until it shines like an impossible diamond.

“No. But I may know someone who could give a hand for a while.”

He knows for a fact Constance has a guest room in which no one has died, and a need for an audience, no matter how sardonic. He never expected to be so pleased with his idea, if you can call it that. Of course Buckhorn is still a dry hole and he needs to see Harry, but he might visit soon too, checking how they get along and if Constance still burns her lasagnas with Diane gazing at the oven like a sphinx. Constance is a good person to talk to. There is no ideal place, there might not even be a truly good place anywhere. But somewhere in the interstices, there can be company.

When he manages to pay attention again, he finds Diane looking in the direction of the kitchen almost wistfully, and there is something in her expression that resists description, a sort of pull toward that door that puzzles him entirely. The look lingers, and when eventually she turns back to him she states:

“Really, I turn my back for five minutes and suddenly you only seem to have very desperate friends.”

“It’s good to have you back.”

This seems to suck all playfulness from Diane’s eyes: she watches him intently, suddenly so grave he can’t help but wonder how much she’s hiding, for his sake and for her own comfort.

“There’s a funeral tomorrow – well, an ash scattering thing. Margaret Lanterman. I’m going with Doris – so is everyone, apparently. You should come.”

More than a suggestion, it’s an advice.

“You never come to funerals,” she adds.

“Don’t I?”

She smiles at him again, a Cheshire grin that is half pity half hurt, and her hand goes back to her neck, rubbing what seems to be an aching spot. He can’t help but follow the course of her fingers intently, lightly tapping at the skin, still slightly trembling: her nails, he realizes, are bare. Bare as he’s never, not once in his life, seen them before.

He swallows the emptiness in his throat, nods in agreement. And then, he starts crying.

It’s only days later that Doris discovers the abandoned gun in her flowerpot, damp from the rain and the lushness of the soil.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I said I was sad too. Besides, imagine what that Constance-Diane house sharing would be like. Like Friends, but better. I'm all for it, personally.


	13. 7. Funeral (Saturday, October 15th)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Many happy returns.

**DIANE**

How can one say ‘I’m back’? The decision, it would seem, is as much your own as it is that of those around you who hear the words, weight them, and weight you in return. You’re always part of a crowd, no matter if that crowd is mostly composed of different angles of yourself. Of course you can try to point at a moment in time and call it yours, trace a line between then and now and draw yourself the lightest suitcase of memories, minimum baggage for rainy days, but in the end, it will still need to be opened and searched. Possessions of the lost souls. No matter what you could wish for, the body is an archive of itself.

*

Doris says Margaret Lanterman knew a lot about grief. Not in so many words, but she’s beginning to actually hear Doris, to pierce through her layers of anger just as she held her through her layers of pain – it almost frustrates her that, years ago, she would have understood at once. There’s something mysterious and reverent in the way every resident seems to feel the need to call at their house, asking Doris what they should bring, who they should pick up, what can one bake and which sort of flowers you’re supposed to buy for the ash scattering of someone who used to cross your beds with heavy boots whenever she had something important to say.

She’s heard Lucy has arranged a pine-cone planting event for the ceremony.

It may be true, she believes now, that her sadness could end. One day. But if Margaret really was all she appeared to be, she also knew the extend of what she had written: this sadness may end, but not the sadness of the trees, not the sadness of abandoned trucks near a closed mill, with their circles of empty beer bottles put to rest in the grass. This sort of sadness always endured but passed on, and from time to time, for one of the bearers, it simply went away. From what she understands through thin walls, because Hawk occasionally calls too, Margaret wasn’t afraid to wear her grief ahead of her, like a charm, greeted it and murmured to it in front of people who couldn’t understand.

She will have to talk to the deputy again, later – gently tugging on his sleeve as he stands feet away from the funeral crowd and she smokes a stolen cigarette in the cover of the trees. What they will say to each other, though, is to remain a secret.

*

She’s looked through the entirety of Doris’s box, less afraid that she used to be of all the clothes that proclaim the body that wore them like a second skin would never fit, never be the same again. Her hand has found the liquid-like fabric of a long purple dress, probably from the late 70s, that dragged a bit as she walked as if it was never going to catch up with her. Assorted with heavy golden bracelets, dead weights at the bottom of the carton, it makes the perfect half-mourning attire, striking enough for an homage. She’s painted her eyes with an old kohl stick she found in Doris’s vanity, feeling like a child trying on her mother’s heels. On the whole, she looks as much as her old self as could be, and it’s mostly fine by her: she no longer believes in counterfeits.

When she climbs down the stairs on Saturday morning, the Trumans pause in their quiet argument to stare at her. It’s been a long time since she has received that kind of attention: the pressure of their gaze makes her regret her flannels and sweatpants for an instant, before she remembers there are many ways of being seen. So, bracing herself, she just stands there, still, her hand steady on the banister, and tries to look back. If she strikes a bit of a pose, it’s purely because old habits are slowly coming back to her.

Doris has stopped scrubbing a pan that’s already gleaming as a mirror: she looks like she may want to cry, and for the life of her she cannot begin to imagine why.

*

After Albert left, she asked if they could watch _Invitation to Love_ again _._ For a reason that was difficult to articulate, her head was suddenly full of it: romantic intrigues and failed attempts of murder, lost love found at last, legitimate spouses thought dead, secret children who sprung out of thin air, episodes and episodes of dialogues, talking and talking until the end of time only to rewind it after every climax, to start all over again. The continuity errors were so numerous it was hard to keep score of the reason Ruby, Jade’s daughter, got caught in that spectacular car accident, or who her real mother even was. Still, she bathed in the artificiality of the drama, immersed herself in its flux. Doris let her steal the largest part of the blanket and talk at the screen: she suspected it was a privilege hard-earned.

It was only then, nestled under heavy pillows to watch the repetitive shots of Ruby’s frail wrist slowly absorbing the hospital perfusion, that she could finally begin to think about her own death.

There were so many ways a bullet in the neck could fail to kill you – or kill you excruciatingly slowly, let you contemplate your whole life, bits by bits, snippet by snippet of Technicolor fever dream like in a magic lantern show of old, until you could recognize that something had happened, something really had happened to you.

And Albert was such a terrible shot.

But she could recognize who she was with him, synchronize with her reflection in his eyes and give him the middle finger while clinging to his hollow chest for dear life. It was Albert. It was as simple as that. You could execute many variations on this single theme, but in the end, when you had to eventually face the music, there was nothing to be afraid of. They would listen to _The Girl With Light Blue Hair_ again.

“She’s going to wake up from her coma now, isn’t she? It’s the worst possible moment for Chad: all those close-ups on her monitor are so subtle I feel like the scenarists are playing whack-a-mole with my brain. And I’m saying that from a place of considerable intellectual decay,” she lazily points out from under the blanket, knowing full well she’s trying to undermine her own point now that she’s capable of concentrating on something for more than three minutes.

“Don’t tell me, in an episode or eight, she breaks out of the hospital and shows up at her father’s mansion in the dead of night, asking what he’s done with her child. I can picture it as clearly as if I were that flower arrangement they keep putting in all the shots.”

Doris pinches her lips and raises her eyebrows mysteriously.

“Well it’s as you said, I’m not telling you.”

Diane scowls at her, wishing she was wearing something more intimidating than Frank’s old pajamas.

“Oh come on, it’s not as if there was any suspense. You can spoil me, I’m sure it’s the hundredth rerun and you know it by heart.”

“Could be. Or it could be _new_ episodes. Either way, you have to find out in your own time,” Doris says with an air of wisdom, as if _Invitation to Love_ was some sort of Confucian lesson to be learned at the end of a long, arguably strenuous journey.

“One episode after the other, no cheating.”

She can’t help but feeling a pang of disappointment, for there is no way she’ll be able to keep on watching without Doris, which only serves to remind her she won’t be forever in this house. Who knows if Albert’s mysterious new friend will have any taste for it: it seems unlikely for anyone willing to befriend Albert so quickly, but life was full of surprises these days.

‘One episode after the other’ wasn’t really her way of approaching anything. But the past few days have forced her to acknowledge there was something moving about a straight line. Like those crossing Albert’s forehead, those in the corner of Doris’s eyes or her own, fragile lines that deepened her expressions like they mattered more, weighted more than before.

“I’ll ask Frank, then. I’m sure he’ll tell me.”

There was no way Frank wasn’t in some way obliged to watch the show with Doris at least some of the time, and the more she thought about it, the more she believed he was probably not as reluctant a viewer as one could have expected.

“You won’t do any such thing!”

A cushion is pushed against her arm, and she looses a fair portion of the blanket in penance. She wonders if Frank ever fights back for it.

“Besides,” Doris adds with a huff, burying herself under the flannelette “his memory is terrible. He never remembers anything.”

*

After her grand entrance as the Ghost of Evans Past, she asks how she can help, nonchalantly running her fingers through the flour that covers the kitchen’s table, and the question suspends something in Doris. There is a moment of anticipation, her mouth opening as if she was about to let out something bigger than herself, something that would require her to spit the whole town out in the middle of the kitchen and set it on fire. But then she seems to remember she doesn’t know her at all, only let her sleep in her dead son’s room. Her face falls. She says:

“Well you can do the eggs.”

After that they work mostly in silence. It soon transpires that neither of them is any good at baking, and really she should be asking why they’re even making a Yule log in October, but she’s worried Doris would only take her tools away, rolling her eyes at her like she was being unreasonable and a tiny bit like Frank. But surprisingly, she’s the first to speak again, abruptly and with a sniff that immediately has her look up in alarm:

“I had a… I’ve spoken to Harry’s doctors. He’s getting better. They won’t take a stand on it, but I know how they speak, that lot. I think he’s getting better.”

Cooper used to joke that she was a saint, as if coffee and efficiency were descended from the sky instead of her painted, real hands: she wonders if hoping for the soundness of body of someone who’s only a distant tape acquaintance may have amounted to something. At any rate, the news certainly make her feel more than she can explain.

As the thought flies away, she sees Doris squinting her eyes at her.

“Tell that to your _friend_ , maybe. Though I wouldn’t expect much. Couldn’t take it when he was diagnosed, I gather. We lost sight of him way before that anyway. Typical. Men,” she adds, as if stating some revolting biological fact. “Men always go AWOL in those cases.”

There is something to say to this, something she has to say, she’s sure. But it’s blocked by the fugitive taste of something salty on her tongue, that could be tequila or nothing like alcohol. She sighs.

“Do you want some coffee?”

*

There is no lesson to be learned from the time she has been lost. But she knows you’re ready to leave a place when you find yourself wishing you could take someone else with you. There’s probably a life out there for a person with such screaming abilities, somewhere far away from all the leaking pipes and the broken motors of the world. It’s not her decision to make, though, and Doris’s plight is from here: in the end there is no running away. Albert was right: everyone has something they need to come back to.

Frank, as it is, ends up being their unexpected savior, taking upon himself to fix the mess they made of the cake, something Doris seems to hold him responsible for anyway. Diane watches him for a long moment, leaning on the counter while she scrapes the reminders of melted chocolate from the bowl with her fingers: he only looks up once, and gives her a slow kind of smile.

The whole scene suddenly strikes her as something of a fixed image. Frank likes making things right for Doris. This is how it works, or most likely doesn’t, because that sort of help can be damning, a band-aid on a forest fire. And from here, with brownish nails and a sweet taste on her tongue, it’s impossible to tell if the Trumans still love each other, if that can still be called ‘love’, or if it’s something else now, different in a way there is a difference between a mirror and a kaleidoscope. It bothers her more than it probably should.

“My friend who came yesterday... I mean, nothing’s decided yet, but he may be able to help me make plans, you know, to find where I should go next.”

She keeps her voice low feeling every bit a coward, and Frank’s eyes are sympathetic, with maybe a touch of melancholy.

“Have you told her?”

Shaking her head, she thinks how it’s only been a few days. What’s the point of a spare room if you don’t use it for people you can spare?

“You’ve been…,” she stops, not knowing what one’s supposed to say in those circumstances.

“It’s alright,” Frank waves if off but she can tell he’s a little concerned nonetheless. It was his idea after all.

“There is no rush, though. You can stay all you need, until it’s decided I mean. I just hope…”

He scratches the back of his head with a tired hand, and for a split second his features contort into something she’s never seen before: the lines deepen into a mask of pain so deep, so utterly unimaginable she almost takes a step back in horror. The air in the kitchen seems to shift. But in a blink it’s gone as if it had never been there, and Frank is rolling sponge cake again with an assured hand, smiling at her benevolently:

“Would you mind calling Doris once you’re all set up? She likes to know everything’s in order, and I wouldn’t want her to worry.”

Even as she fights the sudden unease in her stomach, she remembers the hands that cradled her on the carpet, the hair that clang to her face, the lullaby that was sung.

“Of course.”

*

The rest of the morning is spent in a complex network of phone calls to determine the logistics of the whole event, and Doris’s strange mood endures.

“Some people,” she sniffs angrily after yet another call, “would do about anything to ruin a funeral.”

And while she’s been running all over the place for the last three hours, so much than Diane is genuinely beginning to feel dizzy, she suddenly stops in the middle of the living room and, without the slightest warning, pulls her in a tight, stiff embrace.

She immediately freezes, but then it becomes clear than Doris is actually asking, not giving, asking for herself in the only way she can. So she relaxes a little, not too much, and manages to pat her back, muttering indistinctly about things being okay. This is easier – infinitely easier – than being on the receiving end of such gestures, and for the first time she asks herself how many years Doris has on her.

Eventually, she lets go but keeps her at arm’s length, looking her up and down with something like pride.

“That’s the dress I wore to my last day of work. It’s spectacular on you. You should keep it.”

Thankfully she’s saved from having to answer by the ringing of the bell.

“Ah, at last,” Doris exclaims, switching back to her usual attitude.

The door first reveals a sweater so blue it entirely eclipses the person wearing it: for a moment, there is a Klein-colored spot superimposing on everything, until she can recognize Lucy from the station.

“I hope we’re not late,” she says, and somewhere in her back, Doris huffs.

“That’s a nice sweater,” Diane remarks point blank, the accent of civility foreign on her tongue.

It turns out to be the right thing to say: Lucy’s face lights up like a Christmas tree.

“Thank you. Hawk said Margaret said I should have it. It was hers, you see. He said there was a little label on it, and everything in the house was so tidy and arranged in small piles when he went there to clean up. Not everyone got something, but there was a list of people, Hawk said, so it’s got to mean we did something right. I’ve always wanted a sweater like this. You know, sometimes you just dream the perfect color, but the light is never right for it? I never saw her with this, she must have knitted it a long time ago. It’s a good thing to think about for the moments of silence.”

Lucy’s joy is so distracting she only notices the young man standing behind her after a stunned pause. And who goes to a funeral in a Brando costume, she would ask, if she wasn’t herself trying hard to be a certain version of Marlene Dietrich. He briefly touches the edge of his cap to her.

“Ma’am. Doris.”

Turning around to see if Lucy’s companion is causing any sensation, she finds Doris not paying him any mind but focused on her, looking mildly embarrassed.

“Ah, yes, I forgot to tell you, we’ve got a bit of a mishap with the cars, and now I have to go and pick up Nadine Hurley and a couple of residents at the Fat Trout who can’t drive – you would think people living in a trailer park would at least give lessons a passing thought, but here we are I suppose. And I told Carl, it’s not my problem, but everything always is, right, why not ask Doris, she’ll probably know! So Wally here offered: a motorbike’s not a functioning car if you ask me but I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind…?”

“It’s okay,” she says softly, trying to be reassuring for she can see anguish mounting in Doris’s eyes. “I’ve always had a thing for motorbikes.”

Amazingly, it’s not a lie, only something she punctually revived to annoy Albert at the times they went out together in clubs that allowed patrons he didn’t approve of. It wasn’t even about the men, mostly. She’d always loved the machinery of it all: there must have been a Diane of wheels and screws somewhere along this journey, a Diane of combustion and engines that miraculously energized the road under your feet.

Lucy is watching Doris intently, she notices, and waits for her to turn away to fetch all the food before she grabs the young man’s shoulder affectionately, a gesture that instantly identifies him as her son. It’s oddly fitting, she can only think, just like her dress, just like Albert and her recorded, distant idea of Harry Truman.

“Wally wanted to introduce himself properly. He’s heard about you,” she says enigmatically.

The kid – for how old can he really be, a child in a leather jacket – looks at her gravely.

“I’m glad you’re back in town, Ma’am. One should always travels on one’s own terms.”

And she sort of wants to laugh at him, thinking she’s seen her share of aspiring beat poets in her days, but no. There’s something genuinely peaceful here, she reflects, noting the way Wally’s eyes never falter away from her. Like he’s got himself all figured out, the good and the bad, and chooses to go with it. If she’s right, riding off with him will be the safest thing she’s done since she arrived here.

But Doris is back, carrying a million bags: she should move on. Yet it occurs to her it would be the first time she ever leaves the house since she stepped in on Monday, and suddenly, standing on the threshold, she hesitates. A hand lands on her wounded arm, lightly, unimposing but warm as only human flesh can be. Doris is saying:“I’ll see you at the ceremony, then”, and it sounds like a question.

So she smiles, closes her eyes briefly to remember how it felt, that moment at the door, that moment of balance, and then in the same movement Doris lets her go and she steps outside.

She doesn’t look back, too afraid of what she could see.

Wally is waiting for her by his bike, telling her to hold on tight as they always do, and soon the entirety of Twin Peaks goes by before her eyes, but she doesn’t pay attention. She’s thinking about herself, clinging to a kid dressed like he would have been wild in another life. She’s thinking about how old she is, or should be, of how old Margaret Lanterman may have been.

“Did you know that lady well?” she asks after a few minutes, trying to speak above the engine’s noise.

“Mrs Lanterman was a great soul,” Wally says in absolute seriousness, and she wouldn’t have expected any less.

“She always said nice things about me and passed me gum under the table. Her death saddened me. But her pain had become too great. She was casting too long a shadow these days, which is never good. It was time. Still, I wish I had been nearer. It was a hard blow for a lot of wonderful people.”

As much as she’s aware of her progresses, this is something she’s unprepared for. Other people’s grief.

“You’re often out of town, then?”

There’s a moment of silence, as they pass by what appears to be a schoolyard.

Eventually, Wally says:

“To be from here, it can be difficult.”

Yes, she wants to say. But in truth, how could she know? She’s not from Twin Peaks, and she never will be. Sometimes it’s a blessing, not to be able to understand, and letting external pain rest where it should be. And she’ll probably be reduced to tears come Sunday, because Sundays always had the taste of an ending, but today is a good day, and she ought to enjoy it while it lasts. A good day for a funeral.

When Wally speaks again, there are only meadows on the side of the road.

“I meant to say, I crossed path with your friends, on my way here.”

“My friends?”

“Yeah. A man and a woman, in a black Lincoln. They had a flat tire, and I lent a hand. They say hi.”

For a moment, all she can hear is the sound of the wind in her hair, streaks of all colors lashing her face. After a beat, Wally adds:

“The man said to tell you something.”

She wonders, turning her face away from him to feel the sun on her skin, eyes closed not to be dazzled, if she’s expecting anything, anything in particular. But the road keeps on going, and she cannot think.

“Yeah?” she finally asks, holding onto Wally, holding onto herself.

“Yeah.”

Time hesitates.

“He said he got your message.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay. I guess it was hard for me to give this a conclusion, after it was a thing to work on for such a long time. And then, it’s always hard to end a postcanon fic, because finales, as we know…  
> There are, of course, lots of version of The Girl With Light Blue Hair, but I had this specific one in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdNzCNQmGG0  
> The title for this fic had a vaguely Streetcar Named Desire, “depending on the kindness of strangers” sort of origin. But (and I’m only finding out now that everything’s done) I had no idea there was an actual movie (Canadian, 1990, no less) called The Company of Strangers.   
> The Wikipedia summary for this says: “The film depicts eight women on a bus tour, who are stranded at an isolated cottage when the bus breaks down. Each of the women, all but one of whom were senior citizens, told stories from her own life. A major theme of the film is how the elderly women each face aging and mortality in their own way, and find the courage together to persevere. »  
> So there is that. It is, well, strangely fitting. And it looks amazing frankly, now I have to see it. 
> 
> All I can say is I hope you've enjoyed this. I certainly had an interesting time writing it. 
> 
> And for my closing remaks, I will only say:  
> 1) Can you imagine Diane, Constance *and* Doris sharing an apartment? It's the Golden Girls all over again and I need it to be a show.  
> 2) You should see my notes for this. They're all over the place of course, but the point where I get the image of Diane wearing sweatpants and become obsessed with it is very clear.  
> 3) So, someone broke out of the hospital, eh?

**Author's Note:**

> .


End file.
